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LECTURES 



STUDYOF HISTORY, 



DELIVERED 



IN OXFORD, 1859-GL 



By GOLDWIN SMITH, M.A., 

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN TUE UNIVERSITY OP 
OXFORD. 

TO WUICU IS ADDED 

A LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE N. Y. HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 
IN DECEMBER, 1SG4, ON 

THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 



NEW YORK: 
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

18 6 6. 



REFEREMCE 



-1\\"^ 
%(.^ 

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By Transfer 

D. C. Public Lll9flfy 

FEB 2 3 1933 






DISTRICtfe^Jg^BIA PROPERTY 
IRMSFERRED IROM BU&LIQ LIBRARY 



CONTENTS. 



rAGB 

An Inaugural Lecture 5 

On the Study op History — 1 45 

On the Study of History — II 81 

On some supposed Consequences of the Doctrine of Histor- 
ical Progress 117 

The Moral Freedom of Man 165 

On the Foundation of the American Colonies 185 

The University of Oxford 217 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 



New statutes having just been made by the crown, 
on the recommendation of the council, for the purpose 
of adapting the professorship I have the honor to hold 
to the present requirements of the University, this seems 
a fit occasion for saying a few words on the study of 
Modern History in Oxford, and the functions of this 
Chair in relation to that study. I made some remarks 
on the subject in commencing my first course with my 
class ; but the new statutes were then only under consid- 
eration, and, before venturing to address the University, 
I wished to become acquainted with the state of the 
Modern History school and with the duties of my Chair. 

This Chair was founded in the reign of George I., and 
its original object was to train students for the public 
service. The foundation was double, one Chair here and 
one at Cambridge. Attached to each Chair were two 
teachers of modern languages and twenty king's schol- 
ars, whose education in history and the modern languages 
the professor was to superintend, and the most proficient 
among whom he was to recommend from time to time 
for employment, at home or abroad, in the service of the 
state. Diplomacy was evidently the first object of the 



6 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

foundation, for a knowledge of treaties is mentioned in 
the letters patent of foundation as specially necessary 
for the public interest. Some subsequent regulations, 
though of doubtful validity, named International Law 
and Political Economy, with the Method of reading Mod- 
ern History and Political Biography, as the subjects for 
the professor's lectures. Thus the whole foundation may 
be said to have been, in great measure, an anticipation 
of the late resolution of the University to found a school 
of Law and Modern History. The Professorship of Mod- 
ern History, the Professorship of Political Economy, the 
Chichele Professorship of Diplomacy and International 
Law, the Professor and Teachers of the Modern Lan- 
guages, do now for the students^^ of our present school 
just what the Professor of History and his two teachers 
of Modern Languages were originally intended to do for 
the twenty king's scholars under their care. The whole 
of these subjects have farther been brought into connec- 
tion, in the new school, with their natural associate, the 
study of Law. 

I have failed, in spite of the kind assistance of my 
friends, the Librarian of the Bodleian and the Keeper of 
the Archives, to trace the real author of what we must 
allow to have been an enlightened and far-sighted 
scheme — a scheme which, had it taken effect, might have 
supplied Parliament and the public service in the last 
century with highly - trained legislators and statesmen, 
and perhaps have torn some dark and disastrous pages 
from our history. It is not likely that the praise is due 
to the king himself, who, though not without sense and 
public spirit, was indifferent to intellectual pursuits. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 7 

Conjecture points to Sir Kobert Walpole. That minis- 
ter was at the height of power when the professorship 
was founded under George I. When the foundation was 
confirmed under George IL, he had just thrust aside the 
feeble pretensions of Sir Spencer Compton, and gathered 
the reins of government, for a moment placed in the 
weak hands of the favorite, again into his own strong 
and skillful grasp. If Walpole was the real founder — if 
he even sanctioned the foundation — it is a remarkable 
testimony from a political leader of a turn of mind prac- 
tical to coarseness, and who had discarded the literary 
statesmen of the Somers and Halifax school, to the value 
of high political education as a qualification for the pub- 
lic service. It is also creditable to the memory of a min- 
ister, the reputed father of the system of Parliamentary 
corruption, that he should have so far anticipated one of 
the best of modern reforms as to have been willing to 
devote a large amount of his patronage to merit, and to 
take that merit on the recommendation of Universities, 
one of which, at least, was by no means friendly to the 
crown. 

King George L, however, or his minister, was not the 
first of English rulers who had endeavored to draw di- 
rect from the University a supply of talented and high- 
ly-educated men for the service of the state. I almost 
shrink from mentioning the name which intrudes so 
grimly into the long list of the Tory and High-Church 
Chancellors of Oxford. But it was at least the nobler 
part of Cromwell's character which led him to protect 
Oxford and Cambridge from the leveling fanaticism of 
his party, to make himself our chancellor, to foster our 



8 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

learning -with his all-pervading energy, and to seek to 
draw our choicest 3^outh to councils which it must be 
allowed were always filled, as far as the evil time per- 
mitted, with an eye to the interest of England, and to 
her interest alone. Cromwell's name is always in the 
mouths of those who despise or hate high education, 
who call in every public emergency for native energy 
and rude common sense — for no subtle and fastidious 
philosophers, but strong practical men. They seem to 
think that he really was a brewer of Huntingdon, who 
left his low calling in a fit of fanatical enthusiasm to lead 
a great cause (great, whether it were the right cause or 
the wrong) in camp and council, to win Dunbar against 
a general who had foiled Wallenstein, to fascinate the 
imagination of Milton, and by his administration at home 
and abroad to raise England, in five short years and on 
the morrow of a bloody civil war, to a height of great- 
ness to which she still looks back with a proud and wist- 
ful eye. Cromwell, to use his own words, "was by birth 
a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, 
nor yet in obscurity ;" he was educated, suitably to his 
birth, at a good classical school ; he was at Cambridge ; 
he read law ; but, what was much more than this, he, 
who is supposed to have owed his power to ignorance 
and narrowness of mind, had brooded almost to madness 
over the deepest questions of religion and politics, and, 
as a kinsman of Hampden and an active member of 
Hampden's party, had held intimate converse on those 
questions with the profoundest and keenest intellects of 
that unrivaled age. And therefore his ambition, if it 
was treasonable, was not low. Therefore he bore him- 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 9 

self always not as one who gambled for a stake, but as 
one who struggled for a cause. Therefore the great sol- 
dier loved the glory of peace above the glory of war, 
and, the moment he could do so, sheathed his victorious 
sword ; therefore, if he was driven to govern by force, 
he was driven to it with reluctance, and only after long 
striving to govern by nobler means ; therefore he kept a 
heart above tinsel, and, at a height which had turned the 
head of Caesar, remained always master of himself ; there- 
fore he loved and called to his council-board high and 
cultivated intellect, and employed it to serve the interest 
of the state without too anxiously inquiring how it 
would serve his own ; therefore he felt the worth of the 
Universities, saved them from the storm which laid 
throne and altar in the dust, and earnestly endeavored 
to give them their due place and influence as seminaries 
of statesmen. Those who wish to see the conduct of a 
real brewer turned into a political chief should mark the 
course of Santerre in the French Eevolution. Those 
who wish to see how power is wielded without high cul- 
tivation and great ideas, should trace the course of Na- 
poleon, so often compared with Cromwell, and preferred 
to him— Xapoleon, the great despiser of philosophers — 
and ask whether a little of the philosophy^ which he de- 
spised might not have mitigated the vulgar vanity which 
breathes through his bulletins, and tempered his vulgar 
lust of conquest with some regard for nobler things. It 
would indeed be a flaw in nature if that which Arnold 
called the highest earthly work, the work of government, 
were best performed by blind ignorance or headlong 
force, or by a cunning which belongs almost as much to 

A 2 



10 AN INAUGUKAL LECTURE. 

brutes as to man. The men who have really left their 
mark in England, the founders of her greatness from 
Alfred to the Elizabethan statesmen, and from the Eliz- 
abethan statesmen down to Canning and Peel, have been 
cultivated in various ways ; some more by study, some 
more by thought ; some by one kind of study, some by 
another; but in one way or other they have been all 
cultivated men. The minds of all have been fed and 
stimulated, through one channel or another, with the 
great thoughts of those who had gone before them, and 
prepared for action by lofty meditations, the parents of 
high designs. 

The attempt of the crown, however, to found a politic- 
al school at Oxford and Cambridge by means of this pro- 
fessorship must be said, at the time, to have failed. Per- 
haps at Oxford the Whig seed fell on a Jacobite soil. 
Long after this the evils of a disputed succession were 
felt here, and the University was the slave of one of the 
two political factions, to the utter loss of her true power 
and her true dignity as the impartial parent of good and 
great citizens for the whole nation. The Jacobite Hearne 
has recorded in his Diary his anguish at the base con- 
descension of the Convocation in even returning thanks 
for the professorship to the royal founder, whom he 
styles "the Duke of Brunswick, commonly called King 
George I." ISTor does the new study in itself seem to 
have been more welcome, at this time, than other inno- 
vations. The Convocation point their gratitude especial- 
ly to that part of the royal letter which promises "that 
the hours for teaching his majesty's scholars the Modern 
Lan2:ua2:es shall be so ordered as not to interfere with 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 11 

those already appointed for their acaderaical studies." 
What the academical studies were which were to be so 
jealously guarded against the intrusion of Modern His- 
tory and Modern Languages, what they were even for 
one who came to Oxford gifted, ardent, eager to be 
taught, is written in the autobiography of Gibbon. It? 
is written in every history, every essay, every novel, 
every play which describes or betrays the manners of the 
clergy and gentry of England in that dissolute, heartless, 
and unbelieving age. It is written in the still darker 
records of faction, misgovernment, iniquity in the high 
places both of Church and State, and in the political evils 
and fiscal burdens which have been bequeathed by those 
bad rulers even to our time. The corruption was not 
universal, or the nation would never have lifted its head 
again. The people received the religion which the gen- 
try and clergy had rejected ; the people preserved the 
traditions of English morality and English duty; the 
people repaired, by their unflagging industry, the waste 
of profligate finance, and of reckless and misconducted 
wars. But as to the character of the upper classes, whose 
educational discipline the Convocation of that day were 
so anxious to guard against the intrusion of new knowl- 
edge, there can not be two opinions. We have left that 
depravity far behind us ; but in the day of its ascenden- 
cy perhaps its greatest source was here. 

But not only was Oxford lukewarm in encouraging 
the new studies ; the crown, almost unavoidably, failed 
to do its part. At the time of the foundation Walpole 
was all-powerful, and might have spared a part of the 
great bribery fund of patronage for the promotion of 



12 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

merit. But soon followed the fierce Parliamentary strug- 
gles of his declining hour, when the refusal of a place 
in a public ofiice might have cost a vote, a vote might 
have turned a division, and an adverse division might 
not only have driven the hated minister from place, but 
have consigned him to the Tower. After the fall of 
Walpole came a long reign of corruption, connived at, 
though not shared, even by the soaring patriotism of 
Chatham, in which it would have been in vain to hope 
that any thing which could be coveted by a borough- 
monger would be bestowed upon a promising student. 
Under these most adverse circumstances, few king's schol- 
ars seem ever to have been appointed. The scholars, 
and the commission given by the original statutes to the 
professor to recommend the most diligent for employment 
under the crown, have now, after long abeyance, been 
formally abolished by the council in framing the new 
statutes ; I confess, a little to my regret. The abuse of 
patronage drove the nation to the system of competitive 
examination. Competitive examination, in its turn, may 
be found to have its drawbacks. In that case, there may 
be a disposition to try honest recommendation by public 
bodies ; and in that event, it might not have been out of 
place for the Universities to remind the government of 
the expressed desire and the old engagement of the crown. 
In the mean time. Modern History and its associate 
studies enjoy the more certain encouragement of a Mod- 
ern History School and academical honors. They also 
enjoy, or ought to enjoy, the encouragement of being the 
subjects of examination for the fellowships of All Souls ; 
a college destined by the statesman who founded it, in 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 13 

great measure, for the study of the Civil Law ; that study 
which once formed the statesmen of Europe and connect- 
ed the Universities with the cabinets of kings, and the 
wealthy and powerful professors of which, in Italy, its 
most famous seat, sleep beside princes, magistrates, and 
nobles, in many a sumptuous tomb. 

Possibly, also, the School of Law and Modern History 
being practically a modified revival of the Faculty of 
Law in the University, the subjects of examination for 
the degree of B.C.L., and the qualifications for the degree 
of D.C.L. might be modified in a corresponding manner. 
If this were done, I should not despair of seeing a real 
value imparted to these degrees. I would respectfully 
commend this point to the consideration of the Council. 

The University seems to have had two objects in in- 
stituting the new schools — that of increasing industry by 
bringing into play the great motive power of love of a 
special subject, and that of making education a more di- 
rect training for life. These are the titles of the History 
School to continued support, even if its state for some 
time to come should need indulgence ; as indulgence I 
fear it will long need, unless the University should see 
fit to place it under more regular and authoritative guid- 
ance, and unless the difficulties which colleges find in 
providing permanent tuition in this department can be 
in some way overcome. 

That the love of a special subject is a great spur to in- 
dustry needs no proof, and it has never yet been shown 
that the mind is less exercised when it is exercised with 
pleasure. Every experienced student knows that the 
great secret of study is to read with appetite. Under the 



14 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

old system, the University relied mainly on the motive 
of ambition. Such ambition is manly and generous, and 
its contests here, conducted as they are, teach men to 
keep the rules of honor in the contests of after life. 
Study pursued under its influence generally makes an 
aspiring character ; but study pursued, in part, at least, 
from love of the subject, makes a happier character; and 
why should not this also be taken into account in choos- 
ing the subjects of education ? But the grand and 
proved defect of ambition as a motive is, that it fails with 
most natures, and that it fails especially with those, cer- 
tainly not the least momentous part of our charge, whose 
position as men of wealth and rank is already fixed for 
them in life. 

To make University education a more direct prepara- 
tion for after life may be called Utilitarianism. The ob- 
jection, no doubt, flows from a worthy source. We are 
the teachers of a great University, and we may take 
counsel of her greatness. We may act, and are bound 
to act, on far-sighted views of the real interests of educa- 
tion, without paying too much deference to the mere 
fashion of the hour. But the most far-sighted views of 
the real interests of education would lead us to make our 
system such as to draw hither all the mental aristocracy 
of the country ; its nobility, its gentry, its clergy, its 
great professions, the heads of its great manufactures 
and trades. It was so in the earlier period of our histo- 
ry, when almost every man of intellectual eminence in 
any line must have looked back to the Universities not 
only as the scene of his youth, but as the source of the 
knowledge which was to him power, wealth, and honor. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 15 

To power, wealth, and honor our system of education 
must lead, if it is to keep its hold on England, though 
it should be to power which shall be nobly used, to 
wealth which shall be nobly spent, and to honor which 
shall shine beyond the hour. Utilitarianism in educa- 
tion is a bad thing. But the great places of national 
education may avoid Utilitarianism till government is in 
the hands of ambitious ignorance, till the Bench of Jus- 
tice is filled with pettifoggers, till coarse cupidity and em- 
piricism stand beside the sick-bed, till all the great lev- 
ers of opinion are in low, uneducated hands. Our care 
for the education of the middle classes, however it may 
be applauded in itself, will ill compensate the country for 
our failure to perform thoroughly the task of educating 
our peculiar charge, the upper classes, and training them 
to do, and teaching them how to do, their duty to the 
people. 

There is one class of our students — I fear of late a di- 
minishing class — which I believe the University had es- 
pecially in view in instituting the School of Law and 
Modern History, and which it was thought particularly 
desirable to win to study by the attraction of an interest- 
ing subject, and to train directly for the duties of after 
life, more especially as the education of this class closes 
here. The duties in after life of the class I refer to are 
•peculiar, and its position seems fast becoming unique in 
Europe. 

"In Flanders, Holland, Friesland," says Mr. Laing, in 
his well-known work on Europe in 1848, " about the es- 
tuaries of the Scheldt, Ehine, Ems, Weser, Elbe, and Ey- 
der ; in a great part of Westphalia and other districts of 



16 AN INAUGUEAL LECTUEE. 

Germany ; in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway ; and in the 
south of Europe, in Switzerland, the Tyrol, Lombardy, 
and Tuscany, the peasants have from very early times 
been the proprietors of a great proportion of the land. 
France and Prussia" (it seems he will soon be able to 
say Eussia) " have in our times been added to the coun- 
tries in which the land is divided into small estates of 
working peasant proprietors. In every country of Eu- 
rope, under whatever form of government, however re- 
motely and indirectly affected by the wars and convul- 
sions of the French Ee volution, and however little the 
laws, institutions, and spirit of the government may as 
yet be in accordance with this social state of the people, 
the tendency, during this century, has been to the divis- 
ion and distribution of the land into small estates of a 
working peasant proprietary, not to its aggregation into 
large estates of a nobility and gentry. This has been the 
real revolution in Europe. The only exception is Great 
Britain." In the colonies, we may add, even of Great 
Britain, the tendency to small estates and working pro- 
prietors prevails; and as colonies are drawn, generally 
speaking, from the most advanced and enterprising part 
of the population, their tendencies are to their mother 
country a prophecy of her own future. 

The force of opinion in this age is paramount, and it 
runs with the certainty, if not with the speed of electric- 
ity round the sympathetic circle of European nations. 
Of these two systems, the system of great landowners and 
the system of small working proprietors, that will assur- 
edly prevail which European opinion shall decide to be 
the better for the whole people. But which is the better 



AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 17 

system for the whole people is a, question with a double 
aspect. One aspect is that of physical condition, the oth- 
er is that of civilization. It may be that the civilizing 
influence of a resident class of gentry, well educated 
themselves, and able and willing to be the moral and so- 
cial educators of the people, may countervail the material 
advantages which a landowning peasantry enjoy, and 
even the accession of moral dignity, the prudence, the 
frugality, which the possession of property in the lower 
class, even more than in ours, seems clearly to draw in 
its train.'" But then the gentry must know their posi- 
tion, and own their duty to those by whose labor they 
are fed. They must be resident, they must be well-edu- 
cated, they must be able and willing to act as the social 
and moral educators of those below them. They must 
do their part, and their Universities must make it a defi- 
nite and primary object to teach them to do their part, in 
a system under which, if they will do their part, they at 
least may enjoy such pure, true, and homefelt happiness 
as never Spanish grandee or French seigneur knew. If 
they are to make it their duty, under the influence of 
overstrained notions of the rights of property, to squan- 
der the fruits of the peasant's labor in dull luxury, or in 
swelling the vice and misery of some great capital, the 
cry already heard, "the great burden on land is the land- 
lord," may swell till it prevails — till it prevails in En- 
gland, as it has prevailed in the land, separated from ours 
only by a few leagues of sea, which, eighty years ago, 

* I am here only stating the case as it may be stated in favor of the 
present system, not giving my own opinion on the question. — Note to 2d 
edit. 



18 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

fed the luxury of Versailles. The luxury of Versailles 
seemed to itself harmless and even civilizing ; it was 
graceful and enlightened ; it was not even found wanting 
in philanthropy, though it was found wanting in active 
duty. Before the Kevolution, the fervor and the auster- 
ity of Kousseau had cast out from good society the levity 
and sensuality of Voltaire."^ Atheism, frivolity, heartless- 
ness, sybaritism, had gone out of fashion with Madame 
de Pompadour and Madame Dubarri. Theism, philan- 
thropy, earnestness, even simplicity of life, or at least the 
praise of simplicity of life, had become the order of the 
day; and the beams of better times to come played upon 
the current, and the rainbow of Utopian hope bent over 
it, as it drew, with a force now past mortal control, to the 
most terrible gulf in history. Even the genius of Carlyle 
has perhaps failed to paint strongly enough this charac- 
teristic of the Eevolution, and to make it preach clearly 
enough its tremendous lesson as to the difference between 
social sentiment and social duty. We know Paley's apo- 
logue of the idle pigeon, consuming, squandering, scatter- 
ing about in lordly wastefulness the store of corn labori- 
ously gathered for him by the subservient flock. That 
apologue, catching the eye of King George III., is said to 
have cost Paley a bishopric. But its moral, duly point- 
ed, is nothing more dangerous than that property has its 
duties. Landed property, fortunately for the moral dig- 
nity and real happiness of its possessors, has its obvious 
duties. Funded property, and other kinds of accumula- 
ted wealth, have duties less obvious, to the performance 
of which the possessors must be guided, if their Univer- 

* Sec Lavallee, Histoire des Fran^ais, book iii., section 3, chapter 5. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 19 

sities desire to see them living the life and holding the 
place in creation not of animals of large, varied, and elab- 
orate consumption, but of men. 

But can education teach the rich to do their duty ? If 
it can not, why do the rich come to places of education ? 
If it can not, what have we to do but abdicate that part 
of our trust ? But experience says it can. Look round 
to the really well-educated men of property of your ac- 
quaintance. Are they not, as a body, good and active 
members of society, promoters of good social objects, and, 
if landowners, resident, and endeavoring to earn the rent 
the labor of the people pays them by doing good among 
the people? In feudal times, when the landed aristocra- 
cy and gentry owed the state military service, they were 
trained to arms ; now they owe the state social service, 
and they must be trained by education to social duties ; 
not to the duties of schoolmasters, lecturers, or statists, 
but to the duties of landed gentlemen. Before the late 
changes, the influence of education had hardly been tried 
on them. A little philology and a little geometry, for- 
gotten as soon as learned, might sharpen the wits a little, 
but could awaken no lasting intellectual interests, open 
no intellectual pleasures to compete with animal enjoy- 
ments, kindle generous sympathies and aspirations in no 
heart. ISTow we have for the aristocracy and gentry a 
school, in effect, of Social Science, that is, of Jurispru- 
dence, including Constitutional Law, and of Political 
Economy, with History illustrating both. This appeals, 
as directly as it can, to the interests of the class for whom 
it was instituted, and by whom it appears not to be re- 
jected. It is an experiment, but it is a rational and 



20 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

practical experiment, and human legislation can be no 
more.* 

I dwell on these points because we have heard ex- 
pressed, by persons of influence in council and congrega- 
tion, a desire, which I doubt not extensively prevails, to 
undo our recent legislation; a feeling which, if it does 
not actually bring us back to the old system, may cripple 
the operation of the new. The old system stood con- 
demned, so far as the gentry were concerned, not by its 
theoretical imperfections as a scheme of education, but 
by its manifest results — results which are felt and de- 
plored in country parishes by clergymen who uphold 
the system here. History and its cognate subjects may 
not prove as much intellectual power as the mixed phil- 
osophical and philological culture of the old Classical 
school. Their true place and value, in a perfect system 
of education, will be fixed when we shall have solved 
those great educational problems which, in their present 
uncertainty, and considering their vast importance to so- 
ciety, may worthily employ and well reward the most 
powerful and aspiring minds. But these studies at least 
form a real education, with something that may interest, 
something that may last, something that may set the stu- 
dent reflecting, and make him unwilling to live a mere 
life of idleness by the sweat of other men's brows. If in 
them, as compared with severer studies, some concession 
is made to the comparative feebleness of the principle of 
industry in those who are not compelled to work for their 

* On reviewing this passage I fear I have spoken in too sanguine terms 
of the probable effects of education on those who are without the common 
motives for exertion. — Note to 2d edit. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 21 

bread with brain or hand, it is only a reasonable recogni- 
tion of the real facts of the case, to which all ideals of 
education, as well as of politics, must bend. The diflicul- 
ties of education necessarily increase when it has to do 
with those who are placed by birth at the level to which 
other men by labor aspire, and who are heirs to wealth 
which they have not earned, and honor which they have 
not won. 

One grand advantage the English system of property 
and society has over the rival system of the Continent, 
and it is an advantage which our new scheme of educa- 
tion for the gentry tends directly, and we may say infal- 
libly, to improve. The connection between the distribu- 
tion of property, especially landed property, in a coun- 
try, and its political institutions, is necessarily close ; and 
countries of peasant proprietors have proved hitherto in- 
capable of supporting constitutional government* Those 
countries gravitate toward centralized and bureaucratic 
despotism with a force which in France, after many years 
of Parliamentary liberty, seems to have decisively re- 
sumed its sway. There is no class wealthy and strong 
enough to form independent Parliaments, or of local in- 
fluence sufficient to sustain local self-government through 
the country. There is nothing to stand between the peo- 
ple and the throne. This is the great historic service of 
the English landed gentry, but it is a service which can 
not be well or safely performed without a political edu- 
cation. Europe is filled with the rivalry between the 
Constitutional and Imperialist systems, the greatest polit- 

* This remark must be limited to the monarchical nations of Europe. — 
Note to 2d edit. 



22 AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 

ical controversy wliicli has arisen in any age. Those 
who would watch that controversy with intelligence, and 
judge it rightly, must remember that Parliaments, like 
other institutions, are good only as they are well used. 
If Parliaments were to tax and legislate as ignorant and 
bigoted Parliaments, the blind delegates of class interests, 
have taxed and legislated in evil times, the case of the 
advocates of democratic despotism would be strong. 
Tyranny, the Imperialists might say, is an evil ; but the 
worst tyranny of the worst tyrant is short, partial, inter- 
mittent, and it falls on high and low alike, or rather on 
the high than on the low. There is no tyranny so con- 
stant, so searching, so hopeless, no tyranny which so sure- 
ly makes the people its victims, as class taxation and 
class law. The political ascendency which the gentry in 
feudal times owed to arms they must now retain, if they 
retain it, by superiority of intelligence, and by making it 
felt that their government is a government of reason in 
the interest of the whole people. Conservatism itself, if 
it were the special function of Oxford to produce that 
element of opinion, ought for its own best purposes to be 
an enlightened Conservatism, not a Conservatism of des- 
perate positions and ruinous defeats. We may be on the 
eve of social as well as political change. The new dis- 
tribution of political power, which all parties in the state 
appear to regard as near at hand,* will certainly alter the 
character of legislation, and will very probably draw with 
it an alteration of those laws touching the settlement and 
the inheritance of property by which great estates are 
partly held together. In that case, Oxford may in time 

* In 1859. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTUEE. 23 

cease to have the same class to educate, and may have, 
accordingly, to qualify her system of education. But 
the mission of a University is to society as it is ; and the 
political character and intelligence of the English gentry 
is, and will be for a long time to come, a main object of 
our system and a principal test of its success. 

It is impossible not to be struck with the high charac- 
ter and the high intelligence of the English aristocracy 
and gentry in the early part of the seventeenth century. 
Their lot was cast in an evil day, when the deep-seated 
and long-festeriog division between Anglo-Catholicism 
and Protestantism, and between the political tendencies 
congenial to each, was destined, almost inevitably, to 
break out in a civil contest. But in that contest the gen- 
tlemen of England bore themselves so that their country 
has reason to be proud of them forever. Nothing could 
be more lofty than their love of principles, nothing more 
noble than their disregard of all personal and class inter- 
ests when those principles were at stake. The age was, 
no doubt, one of high emotions, such as might constrain 
the man who best loved his ancestral title and his hered- 
itary lands to hold them well lost for a great cause. 
But it appears likely that education had also played its 
part. The nobility and gentry as a class seem to have 
been certainly more highly educated in the period of the 
later Tudors and the earlier Stuarts than in any other pe- 
riod of our history. Their education was classical. But 
a classical education meant then not a gymnastic exercise 
of the mind in philology, but a deep draught from what 
was the great, and almost the only spriog of philosophy, 
science, history, and poetry at that time. It is not to 



24 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

j)liilological exercise that our earliest Latin grammar ex- 
horts the student, nor is it a mere sharpening of the fac- 
ulties that it promises as his reward. It calls to the 
study of the language wherein is contained a great treas- 
ure of wisdom and knowledge ; and, the student's labor 
done, wisdom and knowledge were to be his meed. It 
was to open that treasure, not for the sake of philological 
niceties or beauties, not to shine as the inventor of a ca- 
non or the emendator of a corrupt passage, that the early 
scholars undertook those ardent, lifelong, and truly ro- 
mantic toils which their massy volumes bespeak to our 
days — our days which are not degenerate from theirs in 
labor, but in which the most ardent intellectual labor is 
directed to a new prize. Besides, Latin was still the lan- 
guage of literary, ecclesiastical, diplomatic, legal, academ- 
ical Europe ; familiarity with it was the first and most 
indispensable accomplishment, not only of the gentlemen, 
but of the high-born and royal ladies of the time. We 
must take all this into account when we set the claims 
of classical against those of modern culture, and balance 
the relative amount of motive power we have to rely on 
for securing industry in either case. In choosing the 
subjects of a boy's studies you may use your own discre- 
tion; in choosing the subjects of a man's studies, if you 
desire any worthy and fruitful effort, 3^ou must choose 
such as the world values, and such as may win the alle- 
giance of a manly mind. It has been said that six 
months' study of the language of Schiller and Goethe 
will now open to the student more high enjoyment than 
six years' study of the languages of Greece and Rome. 
It is certain that six months' study of French will now 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 25 

open to the student more of Europe than six years' study 
of that which was once the European tongue. These are 
changes in the circumstances and conditions of education 
which can not be left out of sight in deahng with the 
generality of minds. Great discoveries have been made 
by accident ; but it is an accidental discovery, and must 
be noted as such, if the studies which were first pursued 
as the sole key to wisdom and knowledge, now that they 
have ceased not only to be the sole, but the best key to 
wisdom and knowledge, are still the best instruments of 
education. 

It would be rash to urge those who are destined to be 
statesmen (and some here may well by birth and talent 
be destined to that high calling) to leave the severer, and 
therefore more highly-valued training, for that which is 
less valued because it is less severe. But those who are 
to be statesmen ought to undergo a regular political edu- 
cation, and they ought to undergo it before they are 
plunged into party, and forced to see all history, all so- 
cial and constitutional questions, and all questions of leg- 
islation, through its haze. There is a mass of informa- 
tion and established principles to be mastered before a 
man can embark usefully or even honestly in public life. 
The knowledge got up for debating societies, though far 
from worthless, is not sufficient. It is necessarily got up 
with the view of maintaining a thesis ; and even the ora- 
tory so formed, being without pregnancy of thought or | 
that mastery of language which can only be acquired by ] 
the use of the pen, is not the oratory that will live. ISTor J 
will the ancient historians and the ancient writers on po- 
litical philosophy serve the turn. The classics are in- 

B 



26 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

deed in this, as in other departments, a wonderful and 
precious manual of humanity ; but the great questions 
of poUtical and social philosophy with which this age 
has to deal — and surely no age ever had to deal with 
greater — have arisen in modern times, and must be stud- 
ied in modern writers. The great problems which perplex 
our statesmen touching the rights of the laboring popu- 
lation and the distribution of political power among all 
classes of the people were completely solved for the an- 
cients by slavery, which placed at once out of the pale 
of political existence those whose capability of using 
rightly political power is now the great and pressing 
doubt. The problems and difficulties of the representa- 
tive system were equally unknown to a state which was 
a city, and all whose free citizens met with ease to de- 
bate and vote in their own persons in the public place. 
So, again, with all the great questions that have arisen 
out of the relations between the spiritual and the tem- 
poral power embodied in Church and State, the duty of 
the state toward religion. Church establishments, tolera- 
tion, liberty of conscience. So, again, with the question 
of the education of the people, which was simple enough 
when the people were all freemen, supported in intellect- 
ual leisure by a multitude of slaves. In the history of 
the ancient republics we see indeed all the political mo- 
tives and passions at work in their native form, and 
through a medium of crystal clearness, but under circum- 
stances so different that few direct lessons can be drawn. 
Compare any revolution of Athens, Corcyra, or Rome, its 
simple springs and simple passions, with the vast com- 
plexity of the motives, sentiments, ideas, theories, aspira- 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 27 

tions, which, are upon the scene in the great drama of the 
French Ee volution. New political, as well as new phys- 
ical maladies are set up from time to time, as one great 
crisis succeeds another in the history of the world. Fa- 
natical persecution was the deadly offspring of the Cru- 
sades ; terrorism of the frenzied reign of the Jacobins. 
Political virtues, though the same in essence, assume a 
deeper character as history advances. The good Trajan 
forbade Pliny, as procurator of Bithynia, to persecute the 
Christians, because persecution was iion hujusce scecuU; 
it did not become that civilized age. But how far re- 
moved is this cold and haughty tolerance, which implicit- 
ly views religion as a question of police, from the deep 
doctrine of liberty of conscience, the late gain of a world 
which, after ages of persecution, martyrdom, and relig- 
ious war, has found — at least its higher and purer spirits 
have found — that true religion there can not be where 
there is not free allegiance to the truth. 

Two advantages the ancient historians have, or seem 
to have, over the modern as instruments of education. 
The first is that they are removed in time from the party 
feelings of the present day. They might be expected to 
be as far from our passions as they are, considering the 
wide interval of ages, marvelously near to our hearts; 
and, undoubtedly, they are farther from our passions than 
the historians of the present day. Yet even to those se- 
rene and lofty peaks of the Old World political prejudice 
has found its way. The last great history of Greece is at 
once a most admirable history and a pamphlet which 
some may think less admirable in favor of universal suf- 
frage, vote by ballot, and popular courts of law. The 



28 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

history of Kome, and of the Eoman Empire especially, 
has been so much fixed on as a battle-ground, though 
often with strange irrelevancy, by the two great parties 
of the present day, that in France it is becoming a ques- 
tion of high police, and writers are liable to fall into the 
hands of administrative justice for taking any but the 
Csesarean side. 

The second advantage of the classical historians is their 
style. Their style, the style at least of those we read here, 
undoubtedly is a model of purity and greatness, and far 
be it from us to disregard style in choosing books of edu- 
cation. To appreciate language is partly to command it, 
and to command beautiful and forcible language is to 
have a key, with which no man who is to rule through 
opinion can dispense, to the heart and mind of man. To 
be the master of that talisman you need not be its slave. 
Nor will a man be master of it without being master of 
better things. Language is not a musical instrument into 
which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones 
are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought ; 
and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence 
is always the glow of truth. The language of the an- 
cients is of the time when a writer sought only to give 
plain expression to his thought, and when thought was 
fresh and young. The composition of the ancient his- 
torians is a model of simple narrative for the imitation 
of all time. But if they told their tale so simply it was 
partly because they had a simple tale to tell. Such 
themes as Latin Christianity, European Civilization, the 
History of the Keformation, the History of Europe during 
the French Revolution, are not so easily reduced to the 



AN INAUGURAL LECTUEE. 29 

proportions of artistic beauty, nor are the passions they 
excite so easily calmed to the serenity of Sophoclean art. 
My friend the Professor of Poetry may be right in saying 
that our great age of art, in history at least, is not yet 
fully come. The subject of the decline of Feudalism and 
the Papacy, and the rise of Modern Society, is not yet 
rounded off The picture of that long struggle may be 
painted by a calm hand when the struggle itself is done. 
But not all ancients are classics. The clumsiest and most 
prolix of modern writers need not fear comparison with 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, nor the dryest and most life- 
less with the Hellenics. Nor are all moderns devoid of 
classical beauty. No narrative so complicated was ever 
conducted with so much skill and unity as that of Lord 
Macaulay. No historical painting ever was so vivid as 
that which lures the reader through all that is extrava- 
gant in Carlyle. Gibbon's shallow and satirical view of 
the Church and Churchmen has made him miss the grand 
action and the grand actors on the stage. But turn to 
the style and structure of his great work, its condensed 
thought, its lofty and sustained diction, its luminous 
grandeur and august proportions, reared as it is out of a 
heap of materials the most confused and mean, and ask 
of what Greek or Eoman edifice, however classical, it is 
not the peer ? In all those sad pages of the history of 
Oxford there is none sadder than the page which, records 
the student -life of Gibbon. The Oxford of that day is 
not the Oxford of ours, and we need not fear once and 
again to speak of it with freedom. But to Oxford are, 
at least, partly due those foul words and images of evil 
which will forever meet the eye of the historical student, 



30 AN INAUGUKAL LECTUEE. 

passing, as the historical students of all time will pass, 
over that stately and nndecaying arch which spans the 
chaos of the declining empire from the Old World to 
the New. 

The intrinsic value of studies is a distinct thing from 
their educational value, though, in the case of manly ed- 
ucation, the one, as I have ventured to submit, is deeply 
affected by the other. It would appear that to be avail- 
able for the higher education a subject must be traversed 
by principles and capable of method ; it must be either a 
science or a philosophy, not a mere mass of facts without 
principle or law. In my next lecture I shall venture to 
offer some reasons for believing, in despite of theories 
which seem in the ascendant, that history can never be a 
science. It is, however, fast becoming a philosophy, hav- 
ing for its basis the tendencies of our social nature, and 
for the objects of its research the correlation of events, 
the march of human progress in the race and in the sep- 
arate nations, and the effects, good or evil, of all the vari- 
ous influences which from age to age have been brought 
to bear on the character, mind, and condition of man. 
This process is being now rapidly carried on through the 
researches of various schools of speculators on historj^, 
from the metaphysical school of Hegel to the positivist 
school of Comte ; researches which, though they may be 
often, though they may hitherto always have been, made 
under the perverse guidance of theories more or less 
one-sided, crude, or fantastic, are yet finding a chemistry 
through their alchemy, and bringing out with their heap 
of dross grain after grain of sterling gold. Pending the 
completion of this process, or its approach to completion, 



AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 81 

I venture to think the History School must draw largely 
for its educational value on the two sciences (they should 
rather be called philosophies) which are associated with 
History in the School, Jurisprudence and PoHtical Econ- 
omy. 

The forms and practice of the law, the art of the advo- 
cate, can not be studied at a University. Jurisprudence 
may be and is studied in Universities. In ours, where 
its shade still hovers, it once flourished so vigorously as 
to threaten less lucrative though more spiritual studies 
with extinction, and pointed the high road of ambition to 
mediseval youth. The Viner foundation seems to have 
been intended to restore its energy by the life-giving vir- 
tue of practical utility. But there is evidence that the 
Yiner foundation, like that of Modern History and Mod- 
ern Languages, was received with some jealousy as an 
intruder on the old studies, and it failed of its effect. 
Otherwise Oxford, perchance, might have had a greater 
part in that code of the laws of free England which is 
now beginning to be framed, and which will go forth, in- 
stinct with the spirit of English justice, to contend for the 
allegiance of Europe with the Imperial code of France. 
In International Law we have had the great name of 
Stowell, the genuine offspring, in some measure, of stud- 
ies pursued here. The great subject of International Law 
was once connected with my Chair. It is now, happily, 
in separate hands, and in those hands it is united with 
Diplomacy; an auspicious conjunction, if we may hope 
that a school of diplomatists will hence arise to raise di- 
plomacy forever above that system of chicanery and in- 
trigue of which Talleyrand was the evil deit}^, and make 



82 AN INAUGUKAL LECTUEE. 

it the instrument of international justice. Truly great 
men have always been frank and honest negotiators, and 
frank and honest negotiation alone becomes a truly great 
people. "He had no foreign policy," says a Frencli 
statesman of a great English minister, "but peace, good- 
will, and justice among nations." A really good and im- 
partial manual of international law"^ is a work still to bo 
produced. There is the same want of a good manual of 
the principles of jurisprudence; the principles of juris- 
prudence in the abstract, and the comparative jurispru- 
dence of different nations. For want of this, we are driv- 
en to study some national system of law, either that of 
the Eomans or of our own country. That of the Eomans 
is somewhat remote, and sometimes veils its principles in 
shapes difficult to pierce, except to a student versed in 
Eoman history. Our own is, as yet, in form barbarous 
and undigested. But except in so far as it is really, and 
not only in forms and terms, a relic of feudalism, it cov- 
ers strong rules of utility and justice, the work of the 
greatest and most upright tribunals the world ever saw. 
It is these rules, and not the technicalities or antiquities 
of English law, that constitute the proper subject of that 
part of our examinations ; especially as of those who pass 
through the school, fewer probably will be destined for 
the actual profession of the law than to be county magis- 
trates, and administer plain justice to the people. 

Political Economy, though once accepted by the Uni- 

* I do not mean to give currency to the special phrase international 
laiv, which I suspect is fraught with dangerous fallacy. There can be no 
law, in the proper sense of the term, where there is no legislator, no tri- 
bunal, no means of giving legal effect to a decision. — Note to 2d edition. 



AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 83 

versity as one of the regular subjects of this Chair, has 
but one foot, as it were, in the new Examination Statute. 
The candidates are permitted to inckide among their sub- 
jects the great work of Adam Smith. Few will think 
that the bounds of safe discretion are exceeded by the 
permission to know something of economical science thus 
accorded to students destined, many of them by their 
birth, more by their wealth or talent, to become the leg- 
islators of a great commercial country, and whose errors 
in economy may bring dearth of bread into every cot- 
tage, and with dearth evils that arise when parent and 
child can not both be fed. Political Economy is still the 
object of antipathies, excusable but unfounded. A hy- 
pothetical science, true in the abstract, but not applicable 
in its rigor to facts, it has been sometimes too rigorously 
applied ; and errors — I believe they are now admitted to 
be errors — touching the relative laws of population and 
food, though they originated with minds animated by a 
sincere love of man, seemed tQ -pccijise the providence and 
contradict the designs of God. Political Economy is 
guilty of seeking to put an end to the existence of a pau- 
per class. Such a class may in imagination be the kneel- 
ing and grateful crowd in the picture among whom St. 
Martin divides his cloak; imagination may even endow 
them with finer moral perceptions than those of other 
m.en; but in reality they are the Lazaroni who sacked 
and burned with Masaniello, and the sans-culottes who 
butchered with Eobespierre. Political Economy, again, 
is guilty — not she alone is guilty — of pronouncing that 
man must eat his bread in the sweat of his own brow ; 
she is not guilty of denying alms to the helpless and the 

B2 



34: AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

destitute. " Dr. Adam Smith's conduct in private life," 
says tlie author of the sketch prefixed to his great work, 
" did not behe the generous principles inculcated in his 
works. He was in the habit of allotting a considerable 
part of his income to offices of secret charity. Mr. Stew- 
art mentions that he had been made acquainted with 
some very affecting instances of his beneficence. They 
were all, he observes, on a scale much beyond what might 
have been expected from his fortune, and were accom- 
panied with circumstances equally honorable to the deli- 
cacy of his feelings and the liberality of his heart." It is 
false sentiment to talk of a political economist as though 
he were a religious teacher, but through no sermons does 
the spirit of true humanity breathe more strongly than 
through the writings of Adam Smith ; nor has any man 
in his way more effectually preached peace and good-will 
on earth. Neither his voice nor that of any teacher can 
put mercy into the heart of fanaticism or ambition, but 
his spirit always wrastles^ and, wroGtles hard and long, 
with those spirits of CTuei.ty to, sav^- ihe world from war. 
Again, no rich man need fear that he will learn from Po- 
litical Economy the moral sophism that luxury may be 
laudably indulged in because it is good for trade. On 
the contrary, he will learn to distinguish between pro- 
ductive and unproductive consumption, and the results 
of each to the community ; and he will have it brought 
home to his mind more effectually, perhaps, than by any 
rhetoric, that if he does live in luxury and indolence, he 
is a burden to the earth. The words, "I give alms best 
by spending largely," have indeed been uttered, and they 
came from a hard, gross heart. But it was the heart not 



AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 85 

of a political economist, but of a most Christian king. 
Those words were the answer of Louis XIY. to Madame 
de Maintenon when she asked him for alms to relieve the 
misery of the people — that people whom the ambition 
and fanaticism of their monarch had burdened with a co- 
lossal debt, brought to the verge, and beyond the verge, 
of famine, and forced to pour out their blood like water 
on a hundred fields that heresy and democracy might be 
extirpated, and that the one true religion and the divine 
pattern of government might be preached to all nations 
with fire and sword. Once more, it is supposed that Po- 
litical Economy sanctions hard dealings between class 
and class, and between man and man; that it encour- 
ages the capitalist to use men as " hands," without fel- 
low-feeling and without mercy ; and these charges are 
found side by side with the sentimental praise of that 
atrocious system of Vagrancy Laws and Statutes of La- 
borers by which expiring feudalism strove to bind again 
its fetters on the half-emancipated serf The poetry of 
the whip, the branding-iron, and the gibbet, to be applied 
to the laborer wandering in quest of a better market, cer- 
tainly finds as little response in the dry mind of Political 
Economy as the poetry of bloody persecutions and judi- 
cial murder. But those who wish to find a condemna- 
tion of the inhumanity as well as the folly of overwork- 
ing and underfeeding the laborer will not have to seek 
far before they find it in the pages of Adam Smith. 
Adam Smith, indeed, condemns in the measured language 
of sober justice ; and he takes no distinction, such as we 
find always tacitly taken in novels and poems by the 
Troubadours of the landed interest, between the grinding 



3Q AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 

manufacturer and the grinding landlord. But perhaps 
his sentence will not on either account have less weight 
with reasonable men. The laws of the production and 
distribution of wealth are not the laws of duty or affec- 
tion. But they are the most beautiful and wonderful of 
the natural laws of God, and through their beauty and 
their wonderful wisdom they, like the other laws of na- 
ture which science explores, are not without a poetry of 
their own. Silently, surely, without any man's taking 
thought, if human folly will only refrain from hindering 
them, they gather, store, dispense, husband, if need be, 
against scarcity, the wealth of the great community of 
nations. They take from the consumer in England the 
wages of the producer in China, his just wages ; and they 
distribute those wages among the thousand or hundred 
thousand Chinese workmen who have contributed to the 
production, justly, to "the estimation of a hair," to the 
estimation of a fineness far passing human thought. 
They call on each nation with silent bidding to supply 
of its abundance that which the other wants, and make 
all nations fellow-laborers for the common store ; and in 
them lies perhaps the strongest natural proof that the 
earth was made for the sociable being, man. To buy in 
the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, the supposed 
concentration of economical selfishness, is simply to fulfill 
the command of the Creator, who provides for all the 
wants of His creatures through each other's help ; to take 
from those who have abundance, and to carry to those 
who have need. It would be an exaggeration to erect 
trade into a moral agency ; but it does unwittingly serve 
agencies higher than itself, and make one heart as well as 
one harvest for the world. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 37 

But, though the philosophy of this school may, for the 
present, be drawn mainly from its Jurisprudence and Po- 
litical Economy, and these will be its most substantial 
studies, there is another element, which must be supplied 
by simple narrative history, written picturesquely and to 
the heart. That element is the ethical element, the train- 
ing of right sympathies and pure affections, without 
which no system of education can be perfect, and for 
want of which mere mathematical or scientific training 
appears essentially defective. The most highly devel- 
oped power of the pure intellect, the driest light, to use 
Bacon's phrase, of the understanding, will make a great 
thinker, but it will not make a great man. Statesmen 
formed by such education would be utterly wanting in 
emotion, and in the power of kindling or guiding it in 
others. They would be wanting in the aspirations which 
move men to do great things. History in this new school 
has to supply the place both of the ancient historians and 
the poets in the Classical school ; and to a great extent it 
may do so. And perhaps it may be truly said that Ox- 
ford, if she is under some disadvantages, possesses some 
great advantages for the appreciation of historical char- 
acter and the ethical treatment of histor}^, not merely as 
a subject of education, but as a literary pursuit, and that 
she may on this ground well aspire to become a great 
school of history. We can not have in this seat of learn- 
ing the knowledge of the world and of action which pro- 
duces such histories as those of Thucydides or Tacitus, 
or even as that of Lord Macaulay, any more than we can 
have the knowledge of war which produces such a his- 
tory as that of Napier. But we have in a singular de- 



38 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

gree the key to moral and spiritual character in all its 
varieties and in all its aspects. Oxford gives us this key 
partly as she is a great school of moral philosophy, part- 
ly from events otherwise most injurious to her usefulness. 
Large spiritual experience, deep insight into character, 
ample sympathies — these at least the University has 
gained by that great storm of religious controversy 
through which she has just passed, and which has cast 
the wrecks of her most gifted intellects on every shore. 
Such gifts go far to qualify their possessor for writing 
the history of many very important periods, provided 
only that they are combined with the love of justice and 
controlled by common sense. 

I have mentioned that the Modern Languages were 
once united with Modern History in this foundation. 
They have now separate foundations, but the two studies 
can not be divorced. A thorough knowledge of history, 
even of the history of our own country, is impossible 
without the power of reading foreign writers. Each na- 
tion, in the main, writes its own history best; it best 
knows its own land, its own institutions, the relative im- 
portance of its own events, the characters of its own great 
men. But each nation has its peculiarities of view, its 
prejudices, its self-love, which require to be corrected by 
the impartial or even hostile views of others. We are 
indignant, or we smile at the religion of French aggran- 
dizement, which displays itself in every page of most 
French historians, and at the constantly recurring intima- 
tion that the progress of civilization, and even of moral- 
ity in the world, depends on the perpetual acquisition of 
fresh territory and fresh diplomatic influence by France. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 89 

Perhaps tliere are some things at which a Frenchman 
might reasonably be indignant or reasonably smile in the 
native historians of a country of whose greatness we may 
be justly, and of whose beneficent action in Europe we 
may be more justly, proud. Besides, in regard to our 
early history much depends upon antiquarian research, 
and antiquarian research is not the special excellence of 
our practical nation. So strongly do I feel that the orig- 
inal arrangement by which Modern History and Mod- 
ern Languages were united was the right one, that I can 
not refrain from expressing a hope that the expediency 
of restoring that arrangement may soon come under the 
consideration of the council, and that one of the most 
flourishing and most practically useful of our depart- 
ments may be completely incorporated into our system 
by becoming a portion of the Modern History School. 

Of the importance of Physical Science to the student 
of Modern History it scarcely becomes me to speak. All 
I can say is, that I have reason to lament my own igno- 
rance of it at every turn. It is my conviction that man 
is not the slave, but the lord, of the material world ; that 
the spirit rffoulds, and is not moulded by, the clay. I 
believe that nations, like men, shape their own destiny, 
let nature rough-hew it as she will. But nature does 
rough-hew the destiny of nations, and the knowledge of 
her workings and influences as they bear on man is a 
most essential part of history. The next generation of 
historical students in Oxford will reach, by the aid of 
this knowledge, what those of my generation can never 
attain. The words of Roger Bacon to his pupil, Tii me- 
Mores radices egeris^ "You will strike root deeper and bear 



40 AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 

fruit higher than your teacher," may be repeated by each 
generation of intellect to thali which is at once its pupil 
and its heir. 

The range of the student's historical reading here must 
necessarily be limited, and we naturally take as the sta- 
ple of it the history of our own country. It fortunately 
happens that the history of our own country is, in one 
important respect, the best of all historical studies. To 
say nothing of our claims to greatness, no nation has 
ever equaled ours in the unbroken continuity of its na- 
tional life. The institutions of France before the Eevo- 
lution are of little practical importance or interest to the 
Frenchman of the present day : there is almost as great 
a chasm of political organization and political sentiment 
between feudal France and the France of Louis XIY. 
The French Canadian, the surviving relic of France un- 
der the old monarchy, is, in every thing but race and 
language, a widely different man from the Frenchman of 
Paris. But we hear of questions in our youngest colo- 
nies being settled by reference to the institutions of Ed- 
ward the Confessor. The same habits of local self-gov- 
ernment which are so much at the root of'our political 
character now, held together English society in the coun- 
ty, the hundred, the parish, the borough, when the cen- 
tral government was dissolved by the civil wars of Hen- 
ry III., the wars of the Eoses, and the Great Eebellion. 
It fortunately happens, also, that the main interest of our 
history lies in the development of our political constitu- 
tion. England has always been a religious country, both 
under the old and under the reformed faith. But she 
has not been the parent of great religious movements. 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 41 

excepting Wyclifiism, which proved abortive. She has 
received her spiritual impulses mainly from without. 
That to which the mind of the nation has been turned 
from its birth, and with unparalleled steadiness, is the 
working out of a political constitution, combining Eo- 
man order with ISTorthern liberty, and harmonizing the 
freest development of individual mind and character 
with intense national unity and unfailing reverence for 
the law. The present age seems likely to decide wheth- 
er this work, so full of the highest effort, moral as well 
as intellectual, has been wrought by England for herself 
alone or for the world.* Political greatness is not the 
end of man, nor is it in political events and institutions 
that the highest interest of history lies. But when we 
arrive at the region of the highest interest, we arrive also 
at the region of the deepest divisions of opinion and of 
feeling. The English Constitution is accepted by all En- 
glishmen, and its development may be traced in this 
Chair without treading on forbidden ground. Even with 
regard to this study, indeed, it is necessary for a Profess- 
or of History to warn his pupils that they come to him 
for knowledge, not for opinions ; and that it will be his 
highest praise if they leave him, with increased materials 
for judgment, to judge with an (5pen and independent 
mind. And, happily, in studying the constitutional his- 
tory of England, modern or medigeval, both professor 
and pupil have before them the noblest model of judicial 
calmness and inexorable regard for truth in that great 
historian of our Constitution whom Oxford produced, 

* I speak of the substance^ not o^ the forms of the Constitution. — Note 
to 2d edit. 



42 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

and who has lately been taken from the place of honor 
which he long held among our living literary worthies 
to be numbered with the illustrious dead. 

In my next lecture I propose to speak of the method 
of studying history. In this I have ventured to plead 
for support and encouragement, and, what is perhaps most 
needed of all, proper guidance for our Modern History 
School.'-^ I rest my plea on the fact that there is a class 
of students destined to perform the most important duties 
to society in after life peculiarly needing education to dis- 
pose and enable them to perform those duties, and whose 
education as a class has hitherto failed ; a fact to which 
I point with less hesitation, because I am persuaded that 
the sense of it led in great measure to the institution of 
the Modern History School. I do not rest my plea on 
any particular theory of education, liberal or utilitarian, 
special or universal, because no theory of education, ra- 
tionally based on the results of our experience, embracing 
the subject in all its aspects, and determining the intrinsic 
value of different studies, their relative effect on the pow- 
ers of the mind and on the character, and the motives to 
industry which can be relied on in the case of each, has 

yet been laid before the world. Let us look the fact in 

• 

* I confess I have been induced to publish this lecture, somewhat late 
and contrary to my original intention, by the hope that I may draw the 
attention of the University to the state of the School of Law and Modern 
History, left as it is without that superintendence which in its infancy it 
must require, and little encouraged by the colleges, even All Souls having 
apparently set aside the Parliamentary ordinance by which its fellowshij^s 
are devoted to the encouragement of the subjects recognized in this school. 

[Written in 1859, since which time some colleges have heartily adopted 
the study. — Note to 2d edit.] 



AN INAUGURAL LECTURE. 48 

the face. We in this place differ widely in our opinions 
respecting education, and our difference of opinions re- 
specting education is intimately connected with our dif- 
ference of opinions respecting deeper things. In this, 
Oxford is only the reflection of a world torn by contro- 
versies the greatest perhaps which have ever agitated 
mankind. But we are all agreed in the desire to send 
out, if we can, good landlords, just magistrates, upright 
and enlightened rulers and legislators for the English 
people. We are all agreed in desiring that the rich men 
who are educated at Oxford should be distinguished 
above other rich men by their efforts to tread what to 
every rich man is the steep path of social duty. And if 
we did not all vote for the foundation of a School of Law 
and Modern History with a view to the better education 
of the gentry, we are all bound to acknowledge and sup- 
port it now that it is founded. It is hard to adapt me- 
diaeval and clerical colleges to the purposes of modern 
and lay education. It is hard, too, to break through the 
separate unity of the college, a strong bond as it has been, 
not only of affectionate association, but of duty. Yet I 
can not abandon the hope that whatever steps may prove 
necessary to provide regular and competent instruction 
in Modern History and the cognate subjects will be taken 
by the University in fulfillment of its promise to the na- 
tion. I feel still more confident that the co-operation of 
the colleges with the staff of the University for this pur- 
pose will not be impeded by jealousies between different 
orders, which were never very rational, and which may 
now surely be numbered with the past. We have all 
one work. The professor is henceforth the colleague of 



4A AN INAUGUEAL LECTURE. 

the tutor in the duties of University education. What 
he was in the Middle Ages is an antiquarian qnestion. 
It is clear that since that time his position and duties 
have greatly changed. The modern press is the medias- 
val professor, and it is absurd to think that in these days 
of universal mental activity and "universal publication 
men can be elected or appointed by convocation or by the 
crown to head the march of thought and give the world 
new truth. Oxford herself is no longer what a Univer- 
sity was in the Middle Ages. No more, as in that most 
romantic epoch of the history of intellect, will the way- 
worn student, who had perhaps begged his way from the 
cold shade of feudalism to this solitary point of intellect- 
ual light, look down upon the city of Ockham and Eoger 
Bacon as the single emporium of all knowledge, the single 
gate to all the paths of ambition, with the passionate rev- 
erence of the pilgrim, with the joy of the miner who has 
found his gold. The functions and duties of Oxford are 
humbler, though still great. And so are those of all who 
are engaged in her service, and partake the responsibili- 
ties of her still noble trust. To discharge faithfully my 
portion of those duties, with the aid and kind indulgence 
of those on whose aid and kind indulgence I must always 
lean, will be my highest ambition while I hold this Chair. 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 



I. 

The first question which the student of history has 
now to ask himself is, Whether history is governed by 
necessary laws ? If it is, it ought to be written and read 
as a science. It may be an imperfect science as yet, ow- 
ing to the complexity of the phenomena, the incomplete- 
ness of the observations, the want of a rational method ; 
but in its nature it is a science, and is capable of being 
brought to perfection. 

History could not be studied as a whole — there could 
be no philosophy of history — till we thoroughly felt the 
unity of the human race. That great discovery is one 
which rebukes the pretensions of individual genius to be 
the sole source of progress, for it was made, not by one 
man, but by mankind. Kindled by no single mind, it 
spread over the world like the light of morning, and the 
prism must be the work of a cunning hand which could 
discriminate in it the blended rays of duty, interest, and 
affection. First, perhaps, the greatness of the Eoman 
character broke through the narrow exclusiveness of 
savage nationality by bending in its hour of conquest to 
the intellect of conquered Greece ; nobler in this than 



46 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

Greece herself, who, with all her philosophy, talked to 
the last of Greek and barbarian, and could never see the 
man beneath the slave. First, perhaps, on the mind of 
the Eoman Stoic, the great idea of the community of man, 
with its universal rights and duties, distinctly though 
faintly dawned ; and therefore to the Eoman Stoic it was 
given to be the real author of Home's greatest gift, the 
science of universal law. Christianity broke down far 
more thoroughly the barriers between nation and nation, 
between freeman and slave, for those who were within 
her pale. Between those within and those without the 
pale she put perhaps a deeper and wider gulf; not in the 
times of the apostles, but in the succeeding times of fierce 
conflict with heathen vice and persecution, and still more 
in the fanatical and crusading Middle Ages. The resur- 
rection of Greece and Eome in the revival of their litera- 
ture made the world one again, and united at once the 
Christian to the heathen, and the present to the remotest 
past. The heathen moralist, teaching no longer in the 
disguise of a school divine, but in his own person ; the 
heathen historian awakening Christian sympathies ; the 
heathen poet touching Christian hearts, showed that in 
morality, in sympathy, in heart, though not in faith, the 
Christian and the heathen were one. That sense of uni- 
ty, traversing all distinctions between Christian and pa- 
gan, and between the churches of divided Christendom, 
has grown with the growth of philosophy, science, juris- 
prudence, literature, art, the common and indivisible her- 
itage of man. A more enlightened and humane diplo- 
macy and the gradual ascendency of international law 
have strengthened the sense of common interests and 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 47 

universal justice from which, they sprang; and France, 
the eldest daughter of the Church, has crusaded to save 
the Crescent from the aggression of the Cross. Com- 
merce, too, breaking link by link its mediasval fetters, 
has helped to knit nations together in sympathy as well 
as by interest, and to remove the barriers of the dividing 
mountains and the estranging sea. There was needed, 
besides, a great and varied range of recorded history to 
awaken thoroughly the historic sense, to furnish abund- 
ant matter for historical reflection, and to arouse a lively 
curiosity as to the relation between the present and the 
past. There was needed a habit of methodical investiga- 
tion with a view to real results, of which physical science 
is the great school. There was needed a knowledge, 
which could only come from the same source, of the phys- 
ical conditions and accessories of man's estate. These 
conditions fulfilled, the philosophy of history was born, 
and its birth opens a new realm of thought, full, we can 
scarcely doubt, of great results for man. Yico, indeed, 
was the precursor of this philosophy. In his mind first 
arose the thought, awakened by the study of Greek and 
Eoman antiquity, that history should be read as a whole, 
and that this whole might have a law. But the law he 
imagined, that of revolving cycles of men and events, 
was wild and fruitless as a dream. 

It was natural that physical science should claim the 
philosophy of history as a part of her own domam, that 
she should hasten to plant her flag upon this newly-dis- 
covered land of thought. Flushed with unhoped-for 
triumphs, why should she not here also triumph beyond 
hope? She scorns to see her advance arrested by the 



48 ox THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

imagined barrier between the physical and moral world. 
The phenomena of man's life and history are complicated, 
indeed, more complicated even than those of the tides or 
of the weather ; but the phenomena of the tides and of 
the weather have yielded or are yielding to close obser- 
vation, well recorded statistics, and patient reasoning; 
why should not the phenomena of man's actions yield 
too, and life and history be filled, like all the world be- 
sides, with the calm majesty of natural law? It is a 
grand thought ; and at this time it finds not only minds 
open to its grandeur, but hearts ready to welcome it. 
Western Christendom has long been heaving with a 
mighty earthquake of opinion, only less tremendous than 
that of the Eeformation because there was no edifice 
so vast and solid as mediaeval Catholicism to be laid 
low by the shock. Some their fear of this earthquake 
has driven to take refuge in ancient fanes, and by altars 
whose fires are cold. Others are filled with a Lucretian 
longing to repose under the tranquil reign of physical 
necessity, to become a part of the material world, and to 
cast their perplexities on the popes and hierarchs of sci- 
ence and her laws. Only let them be sure that what is 
august and tranquilizing in law really belongs to science, 
and that it is not borrowed by her from another source. 
Let them be sure that in putting off the dignity, they also 
put off the burden of humanity. If man is no higher in 
his destinies than the beast or the blade of grass, it may 
be better to be a beast or a blade of grass than a man. 

History is made up of human actions, whether those 
actions are political, social, religious, military, or of any 
other kind. The founding and maintaining of institu- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 49 

tions, the passing and keeping of laws, the erecting and 
preserving of churches and forms of worship, the institu- 
ting and observing of social customs, may be all resolved 
into the element of action. So may all intellectual his- 
tory, whether of speculation, observation, or composition, 
with their products and effects, the bending of the mind 
to thought being in every respect as much an action as 
the moving of the hand. What we call national actions 
are the actions of a multitude of men acting severally 
though concurrently, and with all the incidents of several 
action ; or they are the actions of those men who are in 
power. Whatever there is in action, therefore, will be 
every where present in history, and the founders of the 
new physical science of history have to lay the founda- 
tions of their science in what seems the quicksand of 
free-will. 

This difficulty they have to meet either by showing that 
free-will is an illusion, or by showing that its presence 
throughout history is compatible, in spite of all appear- 
ances, with the existence of an exact historical science. 

They take both lines. Some say " Free-will is an illu- 
sion, or, at least, we can not be sure that it is real. Our 
only knowledge of it is derived from consciousness, and 
it is by no means certain that consciousness is a faculty. 
It is very likely only a state or condition of the mind. 
Besides, the mind can not observe itself: it is not in na- 
ture that the same thing should be at once observer and 
observed." 

It signifies little under what technical head we class 
consciousness. The question is, from what source do 
those who repudiate its indications derive the knowledge 

C 



50 ON" THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

of their own existence ? From what other source do they 
derive the knowledge that their words, the very words 
they "Qse in this denial, correspond to their thoughts, and 
will convey their thoughts to others? The mind may 
not be able to place itself on the table before it, or look 
at itself through a microscope, and there may be nothing 
else in nature like its power of self-observation ; possibly 
the term self-observation, being figurative, may not ade- 
quately represent the fact, and may even, if pressed, in- 
volve some confusion of ideas. But he is scarcely a phi- 
losopher who fancies that the peculiarity of a mental fact, 
or our want of an adequate name for it, is a good reason 
for setting the fact aside. The same writers constantly 
speak of the phenomena of mind, so that it appears there 
must be some phenomena of mind which they have been 
able to observe. In whose mind did they see these phe- 
nomena ? Did they see them in the minds of others, or, 
by self-observation, in their own ? 

But others say, "We admit the reality of free-will; 
but the opposite to free-will is necessity, and to form the 
foundation of our science, we do not want necessity, but 
only causation, and the certainty which causation carries 
with it : necessity is a mysterious and embarrassing word ; 
let us put it out of the question." But then, if necessity 
does not mean the certain connection between cause and 
effect, what is it to mean ? Is the word to be sent adrift 
on the dictionary without a meaning ? The rooted con- 
tradiction in our minds between the notion of freedom 
of action, and that of being bound by the chain of certain 
causation, is not to be removed merely by denying us the 
use of the term by which the contradiction is expressed. 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 51 

But again they say, '' You may as well get over this 
apparent contradiction in life and history between free- 
will and certain science, for you must get over the appar- 
ent contradiction in life and history between free-will and 
the certain omniscience of the Creator, which compre- 
hends human actions, and which you acknowledge as 
part of your religious faith." No doubt this, though an 
argumentum ad hominem^ is perfectly relevant, because the 
objection it meets is one in the minds of those to whom 
it is addressed ; and I think it has been justly observed 
that it can not be answered by distinguishing between 
foreknowledge and after-knowledge, because its force lies 
in the certainty which is common to all knowledge, not 
in the relation of time between the knowledge and the 
thing known. The real answer seems to be this, that the 
words omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, though 
positive in form, are negative in meaning. They mean 
only that we know not the bounds of the knowledge, 
power, or presence of God. What we do know, if we 
know any thing, is that His presence is not such as to 
annihilate or absorb our separate beiog, nor His knowl- 
edge and power such as to overrule or render nugatory 
our free-will. 

ISTor will it avail the constructors of a science of Man 
to cite the moral certainty with which we predict the 
conduct of men or nations whose characters are settled. 
This settled character was formed by action, and the ac- 
tion by which it was formed was free, so that the uncer- 
tain element which baffles science is not got rid of, but 
only thrown back over a history or a life. 

Then they analyze action, and say it follows its motive, 



62 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

and may be predicted from the motive, just as any other 
consequent in nature follows and may be predicted from 
its antecedent. It follows a motive, but how are we to 
tell ivMch motive it will follow? Action is a choice be- 
tween motives ; even in our most habitual acts it is a 
choice between acting and rest. The only ground we 
have for calling one motive the strongest is that it has 
prevailed before ; but the motive which has prevailed be- 
fore, and prevailed often and long, is set aside in every 
great change of conduct, individual or national, by an 
effort of the will, for which, to preserve the chain of 
causation and the science founded on that chain, some 
other antecedent must be found. 

Action, we said, was a choice between motives. It is 
important in this inquiry to observe that it is a choice 
between them, not a compound or a resultant of them all; 
so that a knowledge of all the motives present at any 
time to the mind of a man or nation would not enable 
us to predict the action as we predict the result of a com- 
bination of chemical elements or mechanical forces. The 
motive which is not acted on goes for nothing; and as 
that motive may be and often is the one which — accord- 
ing to the only test we have, that of the man's previous 
actions — is the strongest, we see on what sort of founda- 
tion a science of action and history must build. 

When the action is done, indeed, the connection be- 
tween it and its motive becomes necessary and certain, 
and we may argue backward from action to motive with 
all the accuracy of science. Finding at Eome a law to 
encourage tyrannicide, we are certain that there had been 
tyrants at Eome, though there is nothing approaching to 
historical evidence of the tyranny of Tarquin. 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 53 

Those who would found history or ethics on a neces- 
sarian, or, if they will, a causal theory of action, have 
three things to account for: our feeling at the moment 
of action that we are free to do or not to do ; our ap- 
proving or blaming ourselves afterward for having done 
the act or left it undone, which implies that we were 
free ; and the approbation or blame of each other, which 
implies the same thing. I do not see that they even 
touch any of these problems but the first. They do not 
tell us whether conscience is an illusion or not ; nor, if 
it is not an illusion, do they attempt to resolve for us the 
curious question what this strange pricking in the heart 
of a mere necessary agent means. They do not explain 
to us why we should praise or blame, reward or punish 
each other's good or bad actions, any more than the good 
or bad effects of any thing in the material world ; why 
the virtues and vices of man are to be treated on a total- 
ly different footing from the virtues of food or the vices 
of poison. Praise and blame they do — praise as heartily 
and blame at least as sharply as the rest of the world ; 
but they do not tell us why. We must not be deceived 
by the forms of scientific reasoning when those who use 
them do not face the facts. 

Great stress is laid by the Necessarians on what are 
called moral statistics. It seems that, feel as free as we 
may, our will is bound by a law compelling the same 
number of men to commit the same number of crimes 
within a certain cycle. The cycle, curiously enough, co- 
incides with the period of a year which is naturally 
selected by the Kegistrar General for his reports. But, 
first, the statistics tendered are not moral, but legal. 



54 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

They tell ns only the outward act, not its inward moral 
character. They set down alike under Murder the act 
of a Kush or a Palmer, and the act of an Othello. Sec- 
ondly, we are to draw some momentous inferences from 
the uniformity of the returns. How far are they uni- 
form? M. Quetelet gives the number of convictions in 
France for the years 1826, 7, '8, '9, severally as 4348, 
4236, 4551, 4475. The similarity is easily accounted for 
by that general uniformity of human nature which we 
all admit. How is the difference, amounting to more 
than 300 between one year and the next, to be accounted 
for except by free-will ? But, thirdly, it will be found 
that these statistics are unconsciously, but effectually, 
garbled. To prove the law of the uniformity of crime, 
periods are selected when crime was uniform. Instead 
of four years of the Kestoration, in which we know very 
well there was no great outburst of wickedness, give us 
a table including the civil war between the Burgundians 
and the Armagnacs, the St. Bartholomew, the Eeign of 
Terror, or the days of June, 1848. It will be said, per- 
haps, that this was under different circumstances ; but it 
is a very free use of the term "circumstance" to include 
in it all the evil and foolish actions of men which lead 
to, or are committed in, a sanguinary revolution. Social 
and criminal statistics are most valuable ; the commence- 
ment of their accurate registration will probably be a 
great epoch in the history of legislation and government; 
but the reason why they are so valuable is that they are 
not fixed by necessity, as the Necessarians allege or in- 
sinuate, but variable, and may be varied for the better by 
the wisdom of governments — governments which Neces- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTOEY. 55 

sarians are always exhorting to reform themselves, in- 
stead of showing how their goodness or badness neces- 
sarily arises from the climate or the food. If the statist- 
ics were fixed by necessity, to collect them would be a 
mere indulgence of curiosity, like measuring all the hu- 
man race when we could not add a cubit to their stature. 

It is important, when people talk of calculating the 
probabilities and chances of human action on these sta- 
tistics, to guard against a loose use (which I think I have 
seen somewhere noted) of the words probability and 
chance. Probability relates to human actions, which can 
not be calculated unless you can find a certain antece- 
dent for the will. Chance is mere ignorance of physical 
causes ; ignorance in what order the cards will turn up, 
because we are ignorant in what order they are turned 
down; and it is difficult to see by wdiat manipulation, 
out of mere ignorance, knowledge can be educed. It is 
worth remarking, also, that an average is not a law ; not 
only so, but the taking an average rather implies that no 
law is known. 

But, it may be said, all must give way to a law gather- 
ed by fair and complete induction from the facts of his- 
tory. It is perhaps not so clear why knowledge drawn 
from within ourselves should give way to knowledge 
drawn from without. But, be that as it may, we may 
pronounce at once that a complete induction from the 
facts of history is impossible. History can not furnish 
its own inductive law. An induction, to be sound, must 
take in, actually or virtually, all the facts. But history 
is unlike all other studies in this, that she never can 
have, actually or virtually, all the facts before her. What 



56 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

is past she knows in part; what is to come she knows 
not, and can never know. The scroll from which she 
reads is but half unrolled ; and what the other half con- 
tains, what even the next line contains, no one has yet 
been able to foretell. Prediction, the crown of all sci- 
ence, the new science of Man and History has not ven- 
tured to put on. That prerogative, which is the test o^^ 
her legitimacy, she has not yet ventured to exert. 

Science, indeed, far from indicating that the materials 
for the great induction are complete, would, if any thing, 
rather lead us to believe that the human race and its his- 
tory are young. The vast length of geologic compared 
with the shortness of historic time, whispers that the 
drama for which the stage was so long preparing must 
have many acts still to come. 

This ignorance of what is to come destroys, it would 
seem, among other inductive theories of history, the fa- 
mous one of Comte, who makes the course of history to 
be determined by the progress of science through its 
three stages, "Theological," "Metaphysical," and "Posi- 
tive;" "Positive" having, let us observe, a double mean- 
ing, atheistical and sound, so that the use of it, in effect, 
involves a continual begging of the question. How can 
M. Comte tell that the "Positive" era is the end of all? 
How can he tell that the three stages he has before him 
are any thing but a mere segment of a more extensive 
law? But, besides this, before we proceed to compare a 
colossal hypothesis with the facts, we must see whether 
it is rational in itself, and consistent with our previous 
knowledge. An hypothesis accounting for certain facts 
by reference to the sun's motion round the earth, or any 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 57 

thing else obviously false or absurd, may be dismissed at 
once, without the form of verification. The three terms 
of the supposed series, the Theological, Metaphysical, and 
Positive states, must be distinct and successive, or it will 
be no series at all. Now, taking " Positive" in the fair 
sense, the sense of sound Theology and Positive Science, 
the theological and the scientific view of the world are 
neither distinct nor successive, but may very well go, and 
do often go, together. A man may be, and ISTewton was, 
a sound astronomer and a great discoverer of astronomi- 
cal laws, and yet believe that the stars were made and 
are held in their courses by the hand of God. A man 
may be, and Butler was, a sound moral philosopher, and 
a great discoverer of the laws of human nature, and yet 
believe human nature to be in its origin and end divine. 
Positivists cite for our admiration a saying of Lamennais, 
contrasting, as they suppose, the religious with the scien- 
tific view of things. "Why do bodies gravitate toward 
each other? Because God willed it, said the ancients. 
Because they attract each other, says Science." As 
though God could not will that bodies should attract 
each other. Polytheism, putting the different parts of 
nature under the arbitrary dominion of separate gods, 
conflicts with, and has been overthrown by. Science, 
which proves that one set of laws, the work of one God, 
traverses the whole. And this I venture to think is the 
mustard-seed of truth out of which the vast tree of M. 
Comte's historical theory has grown. So far from there 
being any conflict between Monotheism and Science, all 
the discoveries of science confirm the hypothesis that the 
world was made by one God ; an hypothesis which, it 

2 



58 ON" THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

should be observed, was quite independent of the prog- 
ress of science, since it had been promulgated in the 
first chapter of Genesis before science came into exist- 
ence. As to the Metaphysical era, which is the inter- 
vening term of the series between the Theological and 
the Positive, nothing in history corresponding to this era 
has been or can be produced. Ko age is or can be point- 
ed out in which a nation or mankind believed the phe- 
nomena of the world or of human nature to be produced 
by metaphysical entities. A few philosophers, indeed, 
have talked of nature as the mother of all things, but by 
nature they meant not a metaphysical entity, but either 
the laws of matter personified, in which case they were 
Positivists, or the God of natural religion as opposed to 
the God of revelation, in which case they were Theists ; 
so that of the three terms of the supposed series, the first 
runs into the third, and the second vanishes altogether. 
The theory is open to another objection, which is also fa- 
tal. Against all the facts, though in accordance with the 
bias naturally given to M. Comte's mind by his scientific 
pursuits, it makes the scientific faculties and tendencies 
predominant in man. Which view of science was it that 
predominated in Attila and Timour, who, after all, played 
a considerable part in determining the course of history ? 
What has been said as to the incompleteness of the 
phenomena of history, and the consequent impossibility 
of a final induction as to its law, leads to a remark on the 
theory that " Man is to be studied historically," and its 
necessary corollary that morality is not absolute, but his- 
torical. If there can be no complete historical induction, 
and if, at the same time, Man is to be studied historically, 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 59 

not morally, and the rule of right action is to be taken, 
not from our moral instincts, but from the observation of 
historical facts, it is difficult to see how there can be any 
rule of right action at all. Morality and our moral judg- 
ment of characters and actions must, it would seem, al- 
ways remain in suspense till the world ends, and history 
is complete. History of itself, if observed as science ob- 
serves the facts of the physical world, can scarcely give 
man any principle or any object of allegiance, unless it 
be success. Success accordingly enters very largely into 
the morality of the thorough-going Positivist. He can- 
onizes conquerors and despots, and consigns to infamy 
the memory of men, who, though they fell, fell struggling 
for a noble cause, and have left a great and regenerating 
example to mankind. The morality, not only absolute, 
but mystical, which Positivism in its second phase has 
adopted to satisfy moral instincts, is a mere copy of the 
social aspect of Christianity ; as the Church, the sacra- 
ments, and the priesthood, invented to satisfy our relig- 
ious instincts, are a mere copy of the Church of Eome. 

You may say that virtue has prevailed in history over 
vice, and that our allegiance is due to it as the stronger. 
But, granting that it has prevailed hitherto, to say which 
is the stronger you must see the end of the struggle. 
The theologian who, like Hobbes, makes religion consist 
not in our moral sympathy with the divine nature, but 
in necessary submission to divine power, will find him- 
self in the same dilemma. He claims our allegiance for 
the power of good, not on the ground of our sympathy 
with good, but because it is stronger than the power of 
evil. He, too, before he says which is the stronger, must 



60 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

see the end of the struggle. If evil prevails, his allegi- 
ance must be transferred. 

It is true that morality, in judging the past, must take 
notice of historical circumstances, as morality takes no- 
tice of present circumstances in judging the actions of 
living men. Allowance must be made for the age, the 
country, the state of things in which each character 
moved. In this sense (and it is a most important sense) 
there may be said to be such a thing as historical, in con- 
tradistinction to an absolute, morality ; though a moral- 
ity which disregarded the circumstances of actions in his- 
tory or life would deserve to be called not absolute, but 
idiotic, and, in fact, has never been propounded. But let 
the merit or demerit of an historical action vary ever so 
much with the circumstances, justice has been justice, 
mercy has been mercy, honor has been honor, good faith 
has been good faith, truthfulness has been truthfulness, 
from the beginning, and each of these qualities is one and 
the same in the tent of the Arab and in the senates of 
civilized nations. A sound historical morality will sanc- 
tion strong measures in evil times ; selfish ambition, 
treachery, mnrder, perjury, it will never sanction in the 
worst of times, for these are the things that make times 
evil. 

Again, institutions not good in themselves may be 
good for certain times and countries ; they may be better 
than what went before, they may pave the way for some- 
thing better to follow. Despotism is an improvement on 
anarchy, and may lead to ordered freedom. But there 
must be limits to our catholicity in the case of institu- 
tions as well as in the case of actions. Our sympathy 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 61 

here, too, is bounded hj morality. It is just possible it 
may embrace the institution of slavery, if slavery was 
really a middle term between wars of extermination and 
a free industrial system, though it is almost impossible to 
imagine how slavery could ever be otherwise than inju- 
rious to the character of the slaveowner, whatever it 
might be to that of the slave. But cannibalism, which 
certain theories would lead us philosophically to accept 
as useful and amiable in its place, must have been exe- 
crable every where and in all times. 

So, again, it is most true that there is a general connec- 
tion between the different parts of a nation's civilization ; 
call it, if you will, a consensus, provided that the notion 
of a set of physical organs does not slip in with that term. 
And it is most true that the civilization of each nation 
must, to a certain extent, run its own course. It is folly 
to force on the most backward nations the laws and gov- 
ernment of the most forward, or to offer intellectual in- 
stitutions to tribes which have not attained the arts of 
life. But that which is good for all may be given to all, 
and among the things which are good for all are pure 
morality and true religion. We can not at once give a 
British Constitution to the Hindoo, but we may at once, 
in spite of consensus and necessary development, teach 
him the virtue of truth and the unity of God. The thing 
may be impossible in the eye of the positive science of 
history ; it is done with difficulty, but it is done. 

We have admitted that the philosophy of history is 
indebted to physical science for habits of methodical rea- 
soning with a view to practical results. From physical 
science dealing, however wrongly, with history, we also 



62 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

gain a certain calmness and breadth, of view, derived 
from, regions in ■which there is no partisanship or fanati- 
cism, because there are no interests by which partisan- 
ship or fanaticism can be inflamed. It is less easy to ac- 
knowledge that the student of history is indebted to the 
physical school of historical philosophy for enlarging our 
historical sympathies. That school, on the contrary, ex- 
tinguishes all sympathy in any obvious sense of the 
word. "We can feel love and gratitude for, free effort 
made in the cause of man, but how can we feel love or 
gratitude toward the human organ of a necessary prog- 
ress, any more than toward a happy geological forma- 
tion or a fertilizing river ? On the other hand, it would 
be easy to give specimens of the sort of sympathy and 
the sort of language which results from taking a purely 
scientific view of history and man. "Truth does not re- 
gard consequences," was a noble saying; but there are 
some cases in which the consequences are a test of truth. 
As the physical view of character and action, if it really 
took possession of the mind, must pnt an end to self-ex- 
ertion, so the physical view of the history of nations 
would dissolve the human family by making each nation 
regard the other as in a course of necessary progress, to 
be studied scientifically, but not to be hastened or inter- 
fered with, instead of their doing all they can to enlight- 
en and improve each other. 

We must not suppose that because the order of nation- 
al actions is often necessary, the actions themselves are. 
! A nation may have to go through one stage of knowl- 
edge or civilization before it can reach another, but its 
going through either is still free. Nations must accumu- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 63 

late a certain degree of wealth, before they can have lei- 
sure to think or write ; but the more degraded and indo- 
lent races refuse to accumulate wealth. 

We must guard, too. against physical metaphors in 
talking of history ; they bring with them physical ideas, 
and prejudice our view of the question. Men do not act 
in masses^ but in multitudes, each man of which has a 
will of his own, and determines his action by that will, 
though on the same motives as the rest. Development 
is a word proper to physical organs, which can not be 
transferred to the course of a nation without begging the 
whole question. The same thing may be said of social 
statics and dynamics applied to the order and progress 
of a nation. 

Of course, in hesitating to accept the physical view of 
man, and the exact science founded on that view, we do 
not deny or overlook the fact that, besides the character 
and actions of particular men, there is a common human 
nature, on the general tendencies of which, considered 
in the abstract, the Moral and Economical Sciences are 
founded. In themselves, and till they descend into the 
actions of particular men or nations, these sciences are 
exact, and give full play to all those methods of scientific 
reasoning, of which, once more, physical science seems to 
be the great school. But let them descend into the ac- 
tions of particular men and nations, and their exactness 
ceases. The most exact of them, naturally, is Political 
Economy, which deals with the more animal part of hu- 
man nature, where the tendencies are surer because the 
conflict of motives is less. Yet even in Political Econo- 
my no single proposition can be enunciated, however 



64: ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

true in the general, which is not constantly falsified by 
individual actions. It seems doubtful whether the tend- 
encies are surer in the case of nations than in the case of 
men. The course of a nation is often as eccentric, as 
wayward, as full of heroic and fiendish impulse, as im- 
possible to predict from year to year, from hour to hour, 
as that of a man. The passions of men are not always 
countervailed and nullified by those of other men in a 
nation ; they are often intensified by contagion to the 
highest degree, and national panic or enthusiasm goes far 
beyond that of single men. The course of nations, too, is 
liable to the peculiar disturbing influence of great men, 
who are partly made by, but who also partly make, their 
age. A grain more of sand, said Pascal — say rather a 
grain less of resolution — in the brain of Cromwell, one 
more pang of doubt in the tossed and wavering soul of 
Luther, and the current of England or the world's history 
had been changed. The Positivists themselves, though 
it is their aim to exhibit all history as the result of gen- 
eral laws, are so far from excluding personal influences, 
that they have made a kind of hagiology and demonol- 
ogy of eminent promoters of progress and eminent reac- 
tionists, as though these, rather than the laws, ruled the 
whole ; and no higher, not to say more fabulous, estimate 
of the personal influence of Eichelieu and Burke will be 
found than in the work of a Positivist author who has 
treated all personal history as unphilosophical gossip, 
henceforth to be superseded by histories written on a 
philosophical method. Accidents, too, mere accidents — 
the bullet which struck Gustavus on the field of Llitzen, 
the chance by which the Eussian lancers missed Napoleon 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 65 

in the church-yard of Eylau, the chance which stopped 
Louis XVI. in his flight at Varennes and carried him 
back to the guillotine — turn the course of history as well 
as of life, and baffle, to that extent, all law, all tendency, 
all prevision. 

There are some other views, rather than theories of 
history, besides the strictly Necessarian theory, which 
conflict with free-will, and which may be just noticed 
here. 

One is the view, if it should not be rather called a play 
of fancy, which treats all nations as stereotyped embodi- 
ments of an idea, or the phases of an idea, which is as- 
sumed to have been involved in the original scheme of 
things. China, which is naturally first fixed on in ap- 
plying this hypothesis to the facts of history, may, by a 
stretch of imagination, be taken to embody a stereotyped 
idea, though even in China there has been change, and 
indeed progress, enough to belie the notion. But as to 
all the more progressive nations, this view is so palpably 
contradicted by the most glaring facts that we need hard- 
ly go farther. "We may dispense with asking how an 
idea, which never was present to any mind but that of 
a modern philosopher, became embodied in the actions 
which make up the history of a nation ; how it passed in 
its different phases from nation to nation, and how it hap- 
pens that its last phase exactly coincides with our time. 
The half-poetic character of this view is apparent when 
we are told that the reason for beginning with China is, 
that the light of civilization, as well as the light of the 
sun, must rise in the East; as though the sun rose in 
China! Here, in fact, we see Metaphysical Philosophy, 



66 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

as well as Physical Science, attempting to extend its em- 
pire over a domain which is not its own. 

Other writers erect some one physical influence, the 
influence of race, of climate, of food, into a sort of destiny 
of nations. The importance of these influences is great, 
and to trace them is a task full of interest and instruc- 
tion. But man is the same in his moral and intellectual 
essence, that is, in his sovereign part, whatever his stock, 
whether he live beneath African suns or Arctic frosts, 
whether his food be flesh, corn, or a mixture of the two. 
He is not, as these theorists would make him, the most 
helpless, but the most helpful of animals ; and by his 
mind applied to building, warming, clothing, makes his 
own climate ; by his mind applied to husbandry and 
commerce, modifies his own food. Eace seems, of all 
physical influences, the strongest. Yet how small and 
superficial is the difference, compared with the agree- 
ment, between a cultivated man and a good Christian 
from London and one from Paris, or even between one 
from either of those places and one from Benares. The 
prevailing passion for degrading humanity to mere clay, 
and leveling it with the other objects of physical science, 
is liable, like other prevailing passions, to lead to exag- 
geration. Confident deductions, of the most sweeping 
and momentous kind, are made from a statement of phys- 
ical fact. The statement is overthrown,* yet the deduc- 
tions are not withdrawn, and the world in its present 
mood seems not unwilling to believe that the destruction 
of the proof leaves the theory founded on it still general- 
ly true. 

* See the Edinburg Review, vol. evii., p. 468-9 (April, 1858). 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 67 

There is also a floating notion that the lives of nations 
are limited by some mysterious law, and that they are 
born, grow to maturity, and die like men. But the life 
of a nation is a metaphorical expression. No reason can 
be given why a nation should die; and no nation ever 
has died, though some have been killed by external 
force. 

Parallels between the political courses of nations are 
also sometimes pressed too far, and made to seem like a 
necessary law. Some of the little states of Greece ran a 
remarkably parallel course, but they were not independ- 
ent of each other ; they were all members of the Greek 
nation, and influenced each other's politics by contagion, 
and sometimes by direct interference. A parallel, which 
seemed curiously exact, was also drawn between the 
events of the English and French Ee volutions : it seem- 
ed to hold till the accession of Louis Philippe, but where 
is it now? The similarity between the two revolutions 
was in truth superficial, compared with their dissimilar- 
ity. Eeligion, the main element of the English move- 
ment, was wanting in the French : the flight of the no- 
bility, the confiscation of their estates, and the establish- 
ment of a new peasant proprietary, which decided the 
ultimate character and destiny of the French movement, 
were wanting in the English. So far as there was a sim- 
ilarity, it was produced partly by mere general tenden- 
cies, which lead to anarchy after gross misgovernment, 
to a dictatorship after anarchy, and to the attempt to re- 
cover freedom after a dictatorship ; partly by mere acci- 
dents, such as the want of a son and heir in the case both 
of Charles II. and of Louis XYIIL, and the consequent 



68 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

reversion of the crown to a brother, who belonged by age 
and education to the old state of things. Had Mon- 
mouth been Charles's legitimate son, all probably would 
have been changed. 

Lastly, there is the habit of tracing special acts of 
Providence in history. This sometimes goes the length 
of making history one vast act of special Providence, 
and turning it into a puppet-play, which, our hearts sug- 
gest, might have been played with other puppets, less 
sensible of pain and misery than man. Surely it is per- 
ilous work to be reading the most secret counsels of the 
Creator by a light always feeble, often clouded by preju- 
dice, often by passion. The massacre of St. Bartholomew 
seemed a special act of Providence to the papal party of 
the day. Are Te Deums for bloody victories less pro- 
fane ? Is the scoff of Frederick true, and is Providence 
always with the best-drilled grenadiers? To a believer 
in Christianity nothing seems so like a special act of 
Providence as the preparation made for the coming of 
Christianity through the preceding events in the history 
of Greece and Eome, on which a preacher was eloquent- 
ly enlarging to us the other day. To a believer in 
Christianity it seems so. But those who do not believe 
in Christianity say " Yes ; that is the true account of the 
matter. Christianity arose from a happy confluence of 
the Creek and Eoman with the Hebrew civilization. 
This is the source of that excellence which you call di- 
vine." Thus what appears to one side a singular proof 
of the special interposition of Providence, is used on the 
other side, and necessarily with equal force, to show that 
Christianity itself is no special interposition of Provi- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 69 

dence at all, but the natural result of the historical 
events by which it was ushered into the world. The 
Duke of Weimar spoke more safely when he said of the 
tyranny of the first Napoleon in Germany, "It is unjust, 
and therefore it can not last." He would have spoken 
more safely still if he had said, ''Last or not last, it is un- 
just, and being unjust, it carries its own sentence in its 
heart, and will prove the weakest in the sum of things." 

Is history, then, a chaos because it has no necessary 
law ? Is there no philosophy of history because there is 
no science ? 

There are two grand facts with which the philosophy 
of history deals — the division of nations and the succes- 
sion of ages. Are these without a meaning ? If so, the 
two greatest facts in the world are alone meaningless. 

It is clear that the division of nations has entered deep- 
ly into the counsels of creation. It is secured not only 
by barriers of sea, mountains, rivers, intervening deserts 
— barriers which conquest, the steam- vessel, and the rail- 
road might surmount — but also by race, by language, by 
climate, and other physical influences, so potent that each 
in its turn has been magnified into the key of all history. 
The division is perhaps as great and as deeply rooted as 
it could be without destroying the unity of mankind. 
JSTor is it hard to see a reason for it. If all mankind 
were one state, with one set of customs, one literature, 
one code of laws, and this state became corrupted, what 
remedy, what redemption would there be ? None, but a 
convulsion which would rend the frame of society to 
pieces, and deeply injure the moral life which society is 
designed to guard. Not only so, but the very idea of 



70 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

political improvement might be lost, and all the world 
might become more dead than China. Nations redeem 
each other. They preserve for each other principles, 
truths, hopes, aspirations, which, committed to the keep- 
ing of one nation only, might, as frailty and error are 
conditions of man's bemg, become extinct forever. They 
not only raise each other again when fallen, they save 
each other from falling ; they support each other's steps 
by sympathy and example ; they moderate each other's 
excesses and extravagances, and keep them short of the 
fatal point by the mutual action of opinion, when the ac- 
tion of opinion is not shut out by despotic folly. They 
do for each other nationally very much what men of dif- 
ferent characters do for each other morally in the inter- 
course of life ; and that they might do this, it was neces- 
sary that they should be as they are, and as the arrange- 
ments of the world secure their being, at once like and 
unlike — like enough for sympathy, unlike enough for 
mutual correction. Conquest, therefore, may learn that 
it has in the long run to contend not only against moral- 
ity, but against nature. Two great attempts have been 
made in the history of the world to crush the nationality 
of large groups of nations forming the civilized portion 
of the globe. The first was made by the military Eome 
of antiquity ; the second, of a qualified kind, was made 
by the ecclesiastical Eome of the Middle Ages, partly by 
priestly weapons, partly by the sword of devout kings. 
The result was universal corruption, political and social 
in the first case, ecclesiastical in the second. In both 
cases aid was brought, and the fortunes of humanity were 
restored by a power from without, but for which, it would 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 71 

seem, the corruption would have been hopeless. In the 
first case, the warlike tribes of the North shivered the 
yoke of Kome, and after an agony of six centuries, re- 
stored the nations. In the second case, Greece rose from 
the dead with the New Testament in her hand, and 
breathed into the kindred spirits of the great Teutonic 
races such love of free inquiry and of liberty that they 
rose and rent the bonds of Eome and her Celtic vassals 
— rent them, but at the cost of a convulsion which filled 
the world with blood, and has made mutual hatred almost 
the law of Christendom from that hour to this. Without 
the help of Greece it does not appear that the gate of the 
tomb in which Europe lay would ever have been forced 
back. She might have been pent in it forever, like the 
doomed spirits in Dante when the lid of their sepulchres 
is closed at the last day. Wickliffe and John Huss spent 
their force against it in vain. The tyranny might have 
been differently shared between the different powers of 
the universal Church, between pope and council, between 
pope and king ; but this change would have done little 
for liberty and truth. Nationality is not a virtue, but it 
is an ordinance of nature and a natural bond ; it does 
much good ; in itself it prevents none ; and the experi- 
ence of history condemns every attempt to crush it, when 
it has once been really formed. 

To pass to the other grand fact with which the philoso- 
phy of history deals — the succession of ages. It is clear 
that the history of the race, or at least of the principal 
portion of it, exhibits a course of moral, intellectual, and 
material progress, and that this progress is natural, being a 
caused by the action of desires and faculties implanted in 



72 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

the nature of man. It is natural, but it is not like any 
progress caused by a necessary law. It is a progress of 
effort, having all the marks of effort as clearly as the life 
of a man struggling and stumbling toward wisdom and 
virtue ; and it is as being a progress of effort, not a nec- 
essary development, that its incidents, revealed in his his- 
tory, engage our interest and touch our hearts. 

There seems to be nothing in the fact of progress 
either degrading to human dignity or pampering to hu- 
man pride. The assertion that history began in feti- 
chism and cannibalism is made without a shadow of 
proof. Those states are assumed at a venture to have 
been the first, because they are seen to be the lowest; 
the possibility of their being not original states, but dis- 
eases, being left out of sight. As to fetichism, the first 
hunter or shepherd who swore to another and disap- 
pointed him not, though it were to his own hinderance, 
must have felt the supernatural sanction of duty, and the 
eternity of moral as contrasted with physical evil, and, 
therefore, he must implicitly have believed in the two 
great articles of natural religion — God and the immortal- 
ity of the soul. It is onyihology^ of which fetichism is the 
lowest form, that has its root in nature. Religion has its 
root in man ; and man can never have been without re- 
ligion, however perverted his idea of God, and however 
degraded his worship may have been. As to cannibal- 
ism, it seems to be sometimes a frenzy of the warlike pas- 
sions, sometimes a morbid tendency engendered by the 
want, in certain islands, of animal food. At all events, 
it is most unlikely that the original food of man should 
have been that which is not only the most loathsome, 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 73 

but the most difficult to obtain, since he would have to 
overcome an animal as strong and as cunning as himself. 
Besides, how could the human race have multiplied if 
they had lived upon each other ? 

On the other hand, as progress does not imply a state 
worse than the brutes at the beginning, so it does not 
imply perfection in the end, though it is not for us to 
limit the degree of knowledge or excellence which it 
may have pleased the Creator to render attainable at last 
by man. This doctrine, in truth, checks our pride by 
putting each generation, ours among the number, in its 
true place. It teaches us that we are the heirs of the 
past, and that to that heritage we shall add a little, and 
but a little, before we bequeath it to the future ; that we 
are not the last or the greatest birth of time; that all the 
ages have not wandered in search of truth, that we might 
find it pure and whole ; that we must plant in the hope 
that others will reap the fruit; that we must hand on 
the torch — brighter, if we do our part — but that we must 
hand it on ; and that no spasmodic effort will bring us in 
our span of life and labor to the yet far-off goal. 

But, welcome or unwelcome, the progress of humanity 
down to the present time is a fact. Man has advanced 
in the arts of life, in the wealth which springs from them, 
in the numbers which they support, and with the increase 
of which the aggregate powers and sympathies of the 
race increase. He has advanced in knowledge, and still 
advances, and that in the accelerating ratio of his aug- 
mented knowledge added to his powers. So much is 
clear; but then it is said, "The progress is intellectual 
only, not moral ; we have discoveries of the intellect in- 

D 



74 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

creasing in number and value from age to age, whose au- 
thors are the proper and sole objects of the world's grat- 
itude and love. We have no moral improvement ; the 
moral nature of man remains the same from the begin- 
ning, with the same passions and affections, good and 
evil, which it is confidently added are always in equilib- 
rium. The moral law is the same for all ages and na- 
tions ; nothing has been added to the Decalogue." This 
theory is carried as far as it well can be when it is laid 
down, not only that the progress of humanity is a prog- 
ress of the intellect alone, but that the progressive virtue 
of the intellect lies in skepticism or doubt, the state of 
mind which suspends all action ; and when it is farther 
laid down that moral virtue, so far from causing the 
progress of humanity, sometimes impedes it, the proof of 
which is the mischief done in the world by good men 
who are bigots — as though bigots were good men. 

That morality and man's moral nature remain the same 
throughout history is true ; it is true also that morality 
and the moral nature remain the same throughout man's 
life, from his birth to his old age. But character does 
not remain the same ; the character of the man is contin- 
ually advancing through life, and, in like manner, the 
character of the race advances through history. The 
moral and spiritual experience of the man grows from 
age to age, as well as his knowledge, and produces a 
deeper and maturer character as it grows. Part of this 
experience is recorded in religious books, the writings of 
philosophers, essays, poetry, works of sentiment, tales — a 
class of literature which must seem useless and unmean- 
ing to those who hold that our progress is one of science 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 75 

alone. Part of it is silently transmitted, witli its increase, 
through, the training which each generation gives to the 
next. "We ask why the ancients thought and wrote so 
little about the beauties of nature ? It certainly was 
not that they lived in a land less beautiful, or saw its 
beauties with eyes less keen than ours. But the love of 
natural beauties is not only in the eye ; it requires a cer- 
tain maturity of sentiment to call out the mute sympathy 
with which nature is charged for man, to lend their mys- 
tery to the forest and the sea, its pensiveness to evening, 
its moral to the year. When a modern, instead of writ- 
ing modern poetry, imitates, however skillfully, the -poet- 
ry of the Greeks, how great is the sacrifice of all that 
most touches our hearts, and yet how much that is be- 
yond the range of Greek sentiment remains ! Philan- 
thropy is a Greek word, but how wide a circle of ideas, 
sentiments, affections, unknown to the Greeks, does its 
present meaning embrace 1 In natural religion itself the 
progress seems not less clear. Man's idea of God must 
rise as he sees more of Him in His works, as he sees 
more of Him by reflecting on his own nature (in which 
the true proof of natural religion lies), and in those efforts 
of human virtue in other men which would be unac- 
countable if there were no God, and this world were all. 
More and more, too, from age to age, the ideas of the soul 
and of a future life rise in distinctness ; Man feels more 
and more that he is a traveler between the cradle and 
the grave, and that the great fact of life is death, and the 
centre of human interest moves gradually toward the 
other world. Man would perhaps have been paralyzed 
in his early struggle with nature for subsistence had 



76 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

these deep thoughts then taken too much possession of 
his mind. His earliest and coarsest wants satisfied, he 
began to feel other wants, to think of himself and his 
own destinies, and to enter on a distinct spiritual life. 
Those at least began to do so who had leisure, power of 
mind, and cultivation enough to think, and the reach of 
whose intellects made them feel keenly the narrow limit 
of this life. Yet the spiritual life was confined to few, 
and even in those few it was not of a very earnest kind. 
The Phcedo is a graceful work of philosophic art rather 
than a very passionate effort to overcome the grave. 
The Greek, for the most part, rose lightly from the ban- 
quet of life to pass into that unknown land with whose 
mystery speculation had but dallied, and of which come- 
dy had made a jest. The Eoman lay down almost as 
lightly to rest after his course of public duty. But now, 
if Death could really regain his victory in the mind of 
man, hunger and philosophy together would hardly hold 
life in its course. The latest and most thorough-going 
school of materialism has found it necessary to provide 
something for man's spiritual nature, and has made a 
shadowy divinity out of the abstract being of humanity, 
and a shadowy immortality of the soul out of a figment 
that the dead are greater than the living. Lucretius felt 
no such need. 

If it could be said that there was no progress in human 
character because the moral law and the moral nature of 
man remain the same in all ages, it might equally be said 
that there could be no variety in character because the 
moral law and our moral nature are the same in all per- 
sons. But the variety of characters which our hearts, 



ON" THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 77 

bound to no one type, acknowledge as good, noble, beau- 
tiful, is infinite, and grows with the growing variety of 
human life. It ranges from the most rapt speculation to 
the most vigorous action, from the gentlest sentiment to 
the most iron public duty, from the lowliest flower in the 
poetry of Wordsworth to that grand failure, Milton's pic- 
ture of the fallen Archangel, who lacks the great notes 
of evil, inasmuch as he is not mean or selfish, but is true 
to those who have fallen by him; for them braves a 
worse fate than the worst, and for them, amidst despair, 
wears hope upon his brow. The observance of the mor- 
al law is the basis and condition, as the common moral 
nature is the rudiment, of all excellence in human char- 
acter. But it is the basis and condition only ; it is nega- 
tive, whereas character is positive, and wins our rever- 
ence and affection because it is so. The Decalogue gives 
us no account of heroism or the emotions it excites ; still 
less does it give us an account of that infinite variety of 
excellences and graces which is the beauty of history and 
life, and which, we can not doubt, the great and ever-in- 
creasing variety of situations in history and life were in- 
tended by the Creator to produce. 

If the end and the key of history is the formation of 
character by effort, the end and key of history are the 
same with the end and key of the life of man. If the 
progress of the intellect is the essential part of history, 
then the harmony between man and history is at an end. 
Man does not rest in intellect as his end, not even in in- 
tellect of a far less dry and more comprehensive kind 
than that which the maintainers of the intellectual theory 
of history have in view. If all mankind were Hamlets 



78 ON THE STUDY OF HISTOEY. 

it would scarcely be a happier world. Suppose intellect 
to be tlie end of Man, and all moral effort, all moral beau- 
ty, even all poetry, all sentiment, must go for nothing ; 
they are void, meaningless, and vain — an account of the 
matter which hardly corresponds with the meaning and 
fitness (not to assume design) which we see in every part 
of the physical world. Certainly, if we believe in a Cre- 
ator, it is difiicult to imagine Him making such a world 
as this, with all its abysses of misery and crime, merely 
that some of His creatures might with infinite labor at- 
tain a modicum of knowledge which can be of use only 
in this world, and must come to nothing again when all 
is done. But if the formation of character by effort is 
the end, every thing has a meaning, every thing has a 
place. A certain degree of material well-being, for which 
man naturally exerts himself, is necessary to character, 
which is coarse and low where the life of man is beast- 
like, miserable, and short. Intellect and the activity of 
intellect enter (we need not here ask how) deeply into 
character. For the beauty of intellectual excellence the 
world forgives great weakness, though not vice ; and all 
attempts to cast out intellect and reduce character to emo- 
tion, even religious emotion, have produced only a type 
which is useless to society, and which the healthy moral 
taste has always rejected. And certainly, if character is 
the end of history, and moral effort the necessary means 
to that end (as no other means of forming character is 
known to us), optimism may, after all, not be so stupid as 
some philosophers suppose; and this world, which is 
plainly enough so arranged as to force man to the utmost 
possible amount of effort, may well be the best of all pos- 
sible worlds. 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 79 

We must pause before tlie question liow deep tlie unity 
of humanity and the unity of history goes; how far 
those who, through all the ages, have shared in the long 
effort, with all its failures, errors, sufferings, will share in 
the ultimate result ; how far those who have sown will 
have their part in the harvest, those who have planted in 
the fruit ; how far the future of our race, as well as tlie 
past, is ours. That is a secret that lies behind the veil. 



ON THE STUDY OP HISTORY, 



11. 

In a former lecture I gave reasons for hesitating to be^ 
lieve that history is governed by necessary laws. I sub- 
mitted that history is made up of the actions of men, and V 
that each of us is conscious in his own case that the ac- 
tions of men are free. I am not aware that even an at- 
tempt has been made to reconcile the judgments of the 
retrospective conscience, the belief implied in those judg- 
ments that each action might have been done or left tin- 
done, and the exceptional allowance which conscience 
makes in the case of actions done wholly or partly on 
compulsion, with the hypothesis that our actions are sub- 
ject to causation, like the events of the physical world. 
Wherein is an Alfred more the subject of moral appro- 
bation than a good harvest, or a Philip II. more the sub- 
ject of moral disapprobation than the plague ? This is 
a question to which I am not aware that an answer has 
yet been given. 

Still, if it could be shown that history does, as a matter 
of fact, run in accordance with any invariable law, we 
might be obliged to admit that the Necessarians (so I 
shall venture to call them till they can find another ap- 
plication for the'term "necessity") had gained their cause, 

D2 



62 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

though a strange contradiction would then be estabhshed 
between our outward observation and our inward con- 
sciousness. I therefore examined the hypothesis of M. 
Comte, that the development of humanity is regulated 
by the progress of science through the successive stages 
of Theological, Metaphysical, and Positive. I submitted 
that, among other antecedent objections to the theory, 
these three terms do not form a series, Positive, that is, 
sound Science and Theology not being successive, but co- 
existent in the highest minds. Other writers of the same 
school can hardly be said to have propounded a general 
hypothesis. They have rather brought out, and I ven- 
ture to think immensely exaggerated, the effects pro- 
duced on the comparative history of nations by certain 
ph3^sical influences, especially by the influence of food. 
I think I perceive that there is a tendency among the 
disciples of these teachers to allow that their hypotheses 
are incapable of verification, but, at the same time, to in- 
sist that they are grand generalizations, and that, being 
so grand, it is impossible they should not point to some 
great truth. For my part, I see no more grandeur in a 
scientific hypothesis which is incapable of verification 
than in the equally broad assertions of astrology. I see 
no impossibility, but an extreme likelihood, that physical 
science, having lately achieved so much, should arrogate 
more than she has achieved, and that a mock science 
should thus have been set up where the domain of real 
science ends. I think this supposition is in accordance 
with the tendencies of human nature and with the his- 
tory of human, thought. It is all the more likely that 
this usurpation on the part of science should have taken 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 83 

place, since Theology has tempted Science to usurp by 
long keeping her out of her rightful domain. We see 
here, too, the reaction which follows on all injustice. 

I submitted, moreover, that it is difficult to see how 
history can supply its own inductive law, since its course 
is always advancing, the list of its phenomena is never 
full, and, till the end of time, the materials for the in- 
duction can never be complete. How often would a 
partial observation lead physical science to lay down 
false laws ? 

But why argue without end about that which we may 
bring to a practical test ? If the master-science has been 
discovered, let it show forth its power, and we will be- 
lieve. Let those who have studied the science of Man 
and History predict a single event by means of their sci- 
ence ; let them even write a single page of history on its 
method; let them bring up one child by the rules for 
directing and modifying moral development which it 
gives. There is another and a higher test. Has the 
true key to human character been found ? Then let a 
nobler type of character be produced. Apply the sci- 
ence of humanity, and produce a better man. 

Till the law of history is not "only laid down, but 
shown to agree with the facts, or till humanity has been 
successfully treated by scientific methods, I confess I 
shall continue to suspect that the new science of Man is 
merely a set of terms, such as "development," "social 
statics," "social dynamics," "organization," and, above 
all, "law," scientifically applied to a subject to which, in 
truth, they are only metaphorically applicable ; I shall 
continue to believe that human actions, in history as in 



84 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

individual life and in society, may and do present moral 
connections of the most intimate and momentous kind, 
but not that necessary sequence of causation on which 
alone science can be based ; I shall continue to believe 
that humanity advances by free effort, but that it is not 
developed according to invariable laws, such as, when 
discovered, would give birth to a new science. 

I confess that I am not wholly unbiased in adhering 
to this belief I am ready to face the conclusions of true 
science. Let true science make what discoveries it will, 
for example, as to the origin of life ; terrible and myste- 
rious as they may be, they will not be so terrible or mys- 
terious as death; they can but show us that we spring 
from something a little higher than dust, when we know 
already that to dust we must return. But, however we 
may dally with these things in our hours of intellectual 
ease, there is no man who would not recoil from render- 
ing up his free personality and all it enfolds to become a 
mere link in a chain of causation, a mere grain in a mass 
of being, even though the chain were not more of iron 
than of gold, even though the mass were all beautiful 
and good, instead of being full of evil, loathsomeness, and 
horror. The enthusiasts of science themselves shrink 
from stating plainly what, upon their theory, Man is, and 
how his essence differs from that of a brute or of a tree. 
Is he responsible ? Wherein, it must once more be asked, 
does his responsibility consist? Why praise or blame 
him? Why reward or punish him? Why glow with 
admiration at the good deeds of history or burn with in- 
dignation at the evil? Is the moral world a reality, or 
is it a mere phantasmagoria, a puppet-show of fate ? 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 85 

Some of these writei^s cling to the ideas and love to 
use the names of Spirit and of God. If spirit exists, 
what is the spirit of man? Did it spring together with 
the other part of him by physical development from a 
monad, or from a lower animal type ? We have, deeply 
rooted in our nature, a conviction of the indefeasible, un- 
dying nature of moral good and evil, the real proof that 
our moral part lives beyond the grave. Is this convic- 
tion a freak of our moral nature ? This God who is to 
reign over His own world on condition that He does not 
govern it, what is He ? The Supreme Law of nature ? 
Then let us call Him by His right name. Supposing 
Him distinct from the law of nature, is He above it or 
beneath it ? If He is above it, why is He bound to ob- 
serve it in His dealings with the spirit of man ? Why 
may there not be a whole sphere of existence, embracing 
the relations and the communion between God and man, 
with which natural science has no concern, and in which 
her dictation is as impertinent as the dictation of theol- 
ogy in physics? Why may not spiritual experience and 
an approach to the divine in character be necessary 
means of insight into the things of the spiritual world, as 
scientific instruments and scientific skill are necessary 
means of insight into the things of the material world ? 

If you give us an hypothesis of the world, let it cover 
the facts. The religious theory of the world covers all 
the facts; the physical view of the world covers the 
physical facts alone. 

And, after all, what is this adamantine barrier of law 
built up with so much exultation between man and the 
source from which hitherto all the goodness and beauty 



86 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

of human life has sprung? In the first place, what right 
has inductive science to the term laiu f Inductive science 
can discover at most only general facts ; that the facts are 
more than general, that they are universal — in a word, 
that they are laws, is an assumption for which inductive 
science, while she instinctively builds on it, can herself 
supply no basis. I need not tell my hearers how she has 
attempted it by the hand of a great logician, or how ut- 
terly the attempt has failed. Let her weave mazes of 
thought, observe upon observation, induce upon induc- 
tion as she will, she will find the ground of universals 
and the basis of science to be instinctive reliance in the 
wisdom and unity of the Creator. And thus science, in- 
stead of excluding the supernatural, does constant hom- 
age to it for her own existence. 

In the second place, what is the sum of physical sci- 
ence ? Compared with the comprehensible universe and 
with conceivable time, not to speak of infinity and eter- 
nity, it is the observation of a mere point, the experience 
of an instant. Are we warranted in founding any thing 
upon such data, except that which we are obliged to 
found on them, the daily rules and processes necessary 
for the natural life of man ? "We call the discoveries of 
science sublime ; and truly. But the sublimity belongs 
not to that which they reveal, but to that which they 
suggest. And that which they suggest is, that through 
this material glory and beauty, of which we see a little 
and imagine more, there speaks to us a Being whose na- 
ture is akin to ours, and who has made our hearts capa- 
ble of such converse. Astronomy has its practical uses, 
without which man's intellect would scarcely rouse itself 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 87 

to those speculations ; but its greatest result is a revela- 
tion of immensity pervaded bj one informing mind ; and 
this revelation is made by astronomy only in the same 
sense in wbicli the telescope reveals the stars to the eye 
of the astronomer. Science finds no law for the thoughts 
which, with her aid, are ministered to man by the starry 
skies. Science can explain the hues of sunset, but she 
can not tell from what urns of pain and pleasure its pen- 
siveness is poured. These things are felt by all men, felt 
the more in proportion as the mind is higher. They are 
a part of human nature ; and why should they not be as 
sound a basis for philosophy as any other part ? But if 
they are, the solid wall of material law melts away, and 
through the whole order of the material world pours the 
influence, the personal influence, of a spirit corresponding 
to our own. 

Again, is it true that the fixed or the unvarying is the 
last revelation of science ? These risings in the scale of 
created beings, this gradual evolution of planetary sys- 
tems from their centre, do they bespeak mere creative 
force ? , Do they not rather bespeak something which, 
for want of an adequate word, we must call creative ef- 
fort, corresponding to the effort by which man raises him- 
self and his estate ? And where effort can be discovered, 
does not spirit reign again ? 

A creature whose sphere of vision is a speck, whose 
experience is a second, sees the pencil of Kaphael mov- 
ing over the canvas of the Transfiguration. It sees the 
pencil moving over its own speck, during its own second 
of existence, in one particular direction, and it concludes 
that the formula expressing that direction is the secret 
of the whole. 



88 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

. There is truth as well as vigor in the lines of Pope on 
the discoveries of Newton : 

" Superior beings, when of late they saw 
A mortal man unfold all Nature's law, 
Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape. 
And showed a Newton as we show an ape." 

If they could not show a Newton as we show an ape, or 
a Newton's discoveries as we show the feats of apish 
cunning, it was because Newton was not a mere intel- 
lectual power, but a moral being, laboring in the serv- 
ice of his kind, and because his discoveries were the re- 
ward, not of sagacity only, but of virtue. We can imag- 
ine a mere organ of vision so constructed by Omnipo- 
tence as to see at a glance infinitely more than could be 
discovered by all the Newtons, but the animal which 
possessed that organ would not be higher than the moral 
being. 

Eeason, no doubt, is our appointed guide to truth. 
The limits set to it by each dogmatist, at the point where 
it comes into conflict with his dogma, are human limits ; 
its providential limits we can learn only by dutifully 
exerting it to the utmost. Yet reason must be impartial 
in the acceptance of data and in the demand of proof. 
Facts are not the less facts because they are not facts of 
sense; materialism is not necessarily enlightenment; it 
is possible to be at once chimerical and gross. 

We may venture, without any ingratitude to Science 
as the source of material benefits and the training-school 
of inductive reason, to doubt whether the great secret of 
the moral world is likely to be discovered in her labora- 
tory, or to be revealed to those minds which have been 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 89 

imbued only with her thoughts, and trained in her pro- 
cesses alone. Some, indeed, among the men of science 
who have given us sweeping theories of the world, seem 
to be not only one-sided in their view of the facts, leav- 
ing out of sight the phenomena of our moral nature, but 
to want one of the two faculties necessary for sound in- 
vestigation. They are acute observers, but bad reason- 
ers. And science must not expect to be exempt from 
the rules of reasoning. We can not give credit for evi- 
dence which does not exist, because if it existed it would 
be of a scientific kind ; nor can we pass at a bound from 
slight and precarious premises to a tremendous conclu- 
sion, because the conclusion would annihilate the spirit- 
ual nature and annul the divine origin of man. 

That the actions of men are, like the events of the ' 
physical world, governed by invariable law, and that, con- 
sequently, there is an exact science of man and history, 
is a theory of which, even in the attenuated form it is 
now beginning to assume, we have still to seek the proof. 
But a science of history is one thing, a philosophy of his- 
tory is another. A science of history can rest on noth- 
ing short of causation ; a philosophy of history rests 
upon connection — such connection as we know, and in 
every process and word of life assume, that there is be- 
tween the action and its motive, between motives and 
circumstances, between the conduct of men and the effect 
produced upon their character, between historic antece- 
dents and their results. So far is the philosophy of his- 
tory from being a new discovery, that the most meagre 
chronicle of the Middle Ages, the painted records of 
Egyptian kings, as they show some connection between 



90 ox THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

events, present the germ of a philosophy ; of the philos- 
ophy which, in its highest form, traces the most general 
connections, and traces them through the whole history 
of man. 

The philosophy of history, in its highest sense, as was 
before said, is the offspring of a great fact which has but 
recently dawned upon mankind. That fact is the moral 
unity of the human race. The softening down of mere 
doo'matic and ecclesiastical divisions between different 

o 

parts of Christendom, the intercourse, the moral relation, 
the treaties and bonds ratified by common appeals to 
God, into which Christendom has entered with nations 
beyond its pale, have let in the conviction that virtue 
and truth, however they may vary in their measure, arc 
in their essence the same every where, and every where 
divine. It may be that the growth of this conviction is 
a more potent cause of the change which we see passing 
over the face of the world than even the final deca}^, 
now visibly going on, of feudal institutions, and of the 
social system with which they are connected. Its conse- 
quences, to those who have imagined that the vital faith 
of man rests on ecclesiastical divisions, are not unattend- 
ed with perplexity and dismay. But if the churches of 
Hildebrand, Luther, and Calvin are passing away, above 
them rises that church of pure religion and virtue to 
which in their controversies with each other they have 
all implicitly appealed, and which therefore is above 
them all. A certain man was hung by his enemies 
blindfolded over what he supposed to be a precipice, with 
a rope in his hands ; he clung till his sinews cracked, 
and he had tasted the bitterness of death ; then, letting 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 91 

go the rope, he found that he had been hanging but half 
a foot from the ground. 

Moral discoveries are generally followed by exaggera- 
tion. The unity of the human race has been exagger- 
ated into identity, and a strange vision has arisen of an 
aggregate humanity, of which each man is a manifesta- 
tion and an organ, and into which we at death return ; 
the difference between death and life being that the one 
is an objective, the other a subjective existence. This 
wild realism is broached, singularly enough, by a school 
of thinkers who pour contempt on metaphysical entities. 
It is, in fact, part of a desperate attempt to satisfy the re- 
ligious instincts of man and his sense of immortalit}^, 
when an irrational philosophy, discarding all sources of 
truth but the observation of the outward sense, has cut 
off the belief in the invisible world and God. Among 
the evidences of religion, the fact that the blankest scien- 
tific atheism has been compelled to invent for itself a 
kind of divinity and a kind of spiritual world, and to 
borrow the worship of the Eoman Catholic Church, will 
not hold the lowest place. 

No one can doubt, if he would, that through the life of 
each of us there is carried a distinct line of moral identi- 
ty, along which the retrospective conscience runs. 'No 
one can persuade himself that this line breaks off at 
death, so that when a man dies it ceases to signify what 
his particular life has been. No one can divest himself 
of the sense of individual responsibility, or imagine him- 
self, by any effort of fancy, becoming a part of the mass 
of humanity and ceasing to be himself 

It is not the less certain that we are in a real and deep 



92 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

sense "members one of another," and that moral philos- 
ophy may gain new truth and additional power by taking 
the philosophy of history into its counsels, and contem- 
plating not only individual humanity, but the whole es- 
tate of man. 

The progress of the human race is a truth of which 
every-day language is full; one which needs no logical 
proof and no rhetorical enforcement. That the products 
of human action, thought, contrivance, labor, do not all 
perish with their authors, but accumulate from generation 
to generation, is in itself enough to make each generation 
an advance upon that which went before it. The move- 
ment of history is complex. We asked in a former lec- 
ture what was its leading part, and found reason to think 
that it was the gradual elevation of the human character, 
to which all the other parts of the movement, intellectual 
and material, conduce. The rival claims of intellect to 
be the leading object in the history of humanity, though 
strongly put forward, will scarcely bear examination. 
Intellect may be used for good and it may be used for 
evil ; it may be the blessing of humanity or the scourge ; 
it may advance the progress of mankind, as it did when 
wielded by Luther, or retard it, as it did when wielded 
by Bonaparte. Whether it shall be used for good or 
evil, whether it shall be the blessing of humanity or the 
scourge, whether it shall advance progress or retard it, 
depends on the moral character of the possessor, which 
determines its employment. And this being the case, 
intellect must be subordinate to moral character in his- 
tory. 

Character, indeed, seems to be the only thing within 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTOKY. 93 

the range of our comprehension for the sake of which we 
can conceive God having been moved to create man. 
We needlessly put a stumbling-block in our own way by 
importing into the divine nature the Stoic notion of self- 
suflicing happiness. The highest nature which we can 
conceive is not one which disdains, but one which needs 
affection ; and worthy affection can only spring from or 
be excited by a character of a certain kind. The suppo- 
sition that man was created to love his Creator and to be 
the object of his Creator's love accords with our concep- 
tions both of God and man. It does not accord with our 
conception of God to suppose that He created man with 
such capacity for suffering as well as for happiness, and 
placed him in such a world as this, merely to make an 
exhibition of His own power or to glorify Himself. To 
make an exhibition of power belongs to the restlessness 
of mortal strength, not to the completeness and calmness 
of Omnipotence. To seek glory belongs to weak human 
ambition ; and equivocal indeed would be the glory of 
creation if the history of man were to be its measure. 
One historian after another sets himself to write the pan- 
egyric of his favorite period, and each panegyric is an 
apology or a falsehood. 

Our hearts acquiesce, too, in the dispensation which, 
instead of creating character in its perfection, leaves it to 
be perfected by effort. We can conceive no character in 
a created being worthy of affection which is not produced 
by a moral struggle ; and, on the other hand, the greater 
the moral difficulties that have been overcome, the more 
worthy of affection does the character seem. Try to con- 
ceive a being created morally perfect without effort, you 



94 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

will produce a picture of insipidity whicli no heart can 
love. 

And effort is the law, if law it is to be called, of His- 
tory. History is a series of struggles to elevate the char- 
acter of humanity in all its aspects, religious, intellectual, 
social, political, rising sometimes to an agony of aspira- 
tion and exertion, and frequently followed by lassitude 
and relapse, as great moral efforts are in the case of indi- 
vidual men. Those who espouse the theory of necessary 
development as the key to history are driven to strange 
consequences. They are compelled to represent the tor- 
pid sensualism of the Eoman Empire as an advance upon 
the vigorous though narrow virtue of the Eepublic. I 
see not how they escape from allowing, what with their 
historical sympathies they would not be disposed to al- 
low, that in the history of our own country the Restora- 
tion is an advance upon the Puritan Republic. The facts 
of history correspond better with our moral sense if we 
take the view that the awakening of moral life in the 
race, as in the man, often manifests itself in endeavors 
which are overstrained, chimerical, misdirected, higher 
than the general nature can sustain, and that upon these 
endeavors a reaction is apt to ensue. During the reac- 
tion some of the intellectual fruits of the crisis may be 
gathered in, but the moral nature languishes ; though the 
elevation of the moral type gained by the previous effort 
does not perish, but is gained forever, and, so far as it is 
true, enters forever as an exalting influence into the 
thoughts and lives of men. 

But here another problem presents itself, which may 
be beyond our power fully to solve, but as to which we 



ON" THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 95 

can not forbear to ask, and may possibly obtain, some 
satisfaction. In the material and intellectual world we 
are content to see order and design. The law of gravita- 
tion, the laws of the association of ideas, so far as they 
go, perfectly satisfy our minds. But in history it is oth- 
erwise. Here we are not satisfied with the discovery of 
a law, whether of development or of effort ; we desire, 
we can not help desiring, to see not only order and de- 
sign, but justice. 

We look over history. We see the man almost piti- 
lessly sacrificed to the race. Scarcely any great step in 
human progress is made without multitudes of victims. 
Each pulliug down of worn-out institutions brings per- 
plexity and suffering on that generation, however preg- 
nant with good it may be to the next. Every great 
change of opinion is accompanied, to one generation, by 
the distress of doubt. Every revolution in trade or in- 
dustry, however beneficent in its results, involves suffer- 
ings to the masses which the world is long in learning 
how-to avert. In the rude commencements of govern- 
ment and law, what evils do men endure from tyranny 
and anarchy ! How many of the weaker members of the 
race perish of want and cold before feeble invention can 
bridge the gulf between savage and civilized life ! 

It is difficult to doubt that in the early ages of the 
world races are brought forward to take the lead in his- 
tory by the cruel test of pre-eminence in war and success 
in conquering the neighboring races. To primitive tribes, 
and even to nations long civilized but not yet penetrated 
with the sense of our common humanity, conquest seems 
no crime, but either a natural appetite or an heroic enter- 



96 ox THE STUDY OF HISTOEY. 

prise ; and in the earliest ages tlie circunistauces of sav- 
age hordes are such that thej are inevitably driven on 
each other, or on the neighboriog nations, in quest of 
fresh hunting-fields, new pastures, or richer and sunnier 
lands. The human race reaps from this process a moral 
as well as a physical benefit. There is a connection, not 
clearly traced, yet certain, between the stronger qualities 
in human character, such as courage, and the tenderer 
qualities, such as mercy, while conversely there is a cer- 
tain connection between cowardice and cruelty ; and the 
moral as well as the physical basis of humanity requires 
to be laid in fortitude and strength. 

In philosophy and science, again, the race, like the man, 
advances by the trial of successive hypotheses, which are 
adopted and rejected in turn till the true one is at length 
found. • In these successive trials and rejections, with the 
mental efforts and sacrifices they involve, humanity gains, 
what no sudden illumination could give it, large spiritual 
experience and a deep sense of the value of truth. But 
error is the portion of those generations by whom the 
false hypotheses are tried. !N'or is this process confined 
to the domain of mere intellectual truth ; theories of life 
and modes of self- culture are in like manner tried and 
found impracticable or incomplete, at the expense of 
thousands, among whom are often numbered the flower 
of mankind. "What efl'usion of blood, what rending of 
affections, what misery has been undergone to try out the 
question between different theories of society and govern- 
ment, each of which was plausible in itself I TThat an 
expenditure of high and aspiring spirits was necessary 
to prove that the monastic and contemplative life, in 



ox THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 97 

spite of its strong natural attractions, was not practicable 
for man ! 

Cast your eyes over the world, and see how the masses 
of men, how the majority of nations, labor not only in 
mental, but in moral degradation, to support a high and 
fine type of humanity in the few. Examine any beauti- 
ful work of art, and consider how coarse and dark is the 
life of those who have dug its materials, or the materials 
for the tools which wrought it, out of the quarry or the 
mine. Things absolutely essential to intellectual progress 
are furnished by classes which for ages to come the great 
results of intellect can not reach, and the lamp which 
lights the studies of a Bacon or Leibnitz is fed by the 
wild, rude fisherman of the Northern Sea. 

It is true that wherever service is rendered, we may 
trace some reciprocal advantage, either immediate or not 
long deferred. The most abstract discoveries of science 
gradually assume a practical form, and descend in the 
shape of material conveniences and comforts to the masses 
whose labor supported the discoverer in intellectual leis- 
ure. Kor are the less fortunate ages of history and the 
lower states of society without their consolations. The 
intervals between great moral and intellectual efforts have 
functions of their own. Imperial Eome, amidst her moral 
lassitude, makes great roads, promotes material civiliza- 
tion, codifies the law. The last century had no soul for 
poetry, but it took up with melody, and produced the 
Handels and Mozarts. Lower pains go with lower pleas- 
ures, and the savage life is not without its physical im- 
munities and enjoyments. The life of intense hope that 
is lived in the morning of great revolutions may partly 

E 



98 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

make up for the danger, the distress, and the disappoint- 
ment of their later hour. But these, if they are touches 
of kindness and providence in Nature, welcome as proof 
that she is not a blind or cruel power, fall far short of the 
full measure of justice. 

There are nations which have lived and perished half 
civilized, and in a low moral state, as we may be sure 
was the case with Egypt, and have played but a humble 
part, though they have played a part, in the history of 
the world. There are races which have become extinct, 
or have been reduced to a mere remnant, and whose only 
work it has been to act as pioneers for more gifted races, 
or even to serve as the whetstone for their valor and en- 
terprise in the conflict of primitive tribes. There are 
other races, such as the negro races of Africa, which have 
remained to the present time, without progress or appar- 
ent capability of progress, waiting to be taken up into the 
general movement by their brethren who are more ad- 
vanced, when, in the course of Providence, the age of 
military enterprise is past, and that of religious and phi- 
lanthropic enterprise is come. They wait, perhaps, not 
in vain ; but, in the interim, do not myriads live and die 
in a state little above that of brutes ? 

The question then is. Can we find any hypothesis in 
accordance with the facts of history which will reconcile 
the general course of history to our sense of justice? I 
say, to our sense of justice. I assume here that man has 
really been created in the image of God ; that the moral- 
ity of man points true, however remotely, to the morality 
of God; that human justice is identical with divine jus- 
tice, and is therefore a real key to the history of the 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 99 

world. "If," says Clarke, "justice and goodness be not 
the same in God as in our ideas, then we mean nothing 
when we say that God is necessarily just and good ; and, 
for the same reason, it may as well be said that we know 
not what we mean when we affirm that He is an intelli- 
gent and wise Being ; and there will be no foundation at 
all left on which we can fix any thing. Thus the moral 
attributes of God, however they be acknowledged in words, 
yet in reality they are by these men entirely taken away ; 
and, upon the same grounds, the natural attributes may 
also be denied. And so, upon the whole, this opinion 
likewise, if we argue upon it consistently, must finally 
recur to absolute atheism." Either to absolute atheism 
or to the belief in a God who is mere power, and to re- 
ligion which is mere submission to power, without moral 
sympathy or allegiance. 

I will not turn aside here to combat the opposite the- 
ory. I will merely observe by the way that these things 
have their history. If the doctrines of any established 
Church, are not absolute and final truth, its corporate in- 
terests are apt ultimately to come into collision with the 
moral instincts of man pressing onward, in obedience to 
his conscience, toward the farther knowledge of religious 
truth. Then arises a terrible conflict. To save their 
threatened dominion, the defenders of ecclesiastical inter- 
ests use, while they can, the civil sword, and wage with 
that weapon contests which fill the world with worse 
than blood. They massacre, they burn, they torture, 
they drag buman nature into depths of deliberate cruel- 
ty which, without their teaching, it could never have 
known ; they train men, and not only men, but women, 



100 ON THE STUDY OF HISTOEY. 

to look on with pious joy while frames broken with the 
rack are borne from the dungeon of the Inquisition to 
its pile. Uniting intrigue with force, they creep to the 
ear of kings, of courtiers, of royal concubines ; they con- 
sent, as the price of protection, to bless and sanctify des- 
potism in its foulest form; they excite bloody wars of 
opinion against nations struggling to be free. Still, the 
day goes against them ; humanity exerts its power ; exe- 
cutioners fail ; sovereigns discover that it little avails the 
king to rule the people if the Magian is to rule the king; 
public opinion sways the world, and the hour of Philip 
II., of Pere la Chaise, of Madame de Maintenon, is gone, 
never to return. Then follows a hopeless struggle for 
the last relics of religious protection, for exclusive polit- 
ical privileges, and for tests ; a struggle in which religion 
is made to appear in the eyes of the people the constant 
enemy of improvement and of justice — religion, from 
which all true improvement and all true justice spring. 
This struggle, too, approaches its inevitable close. Then 
recourse is had, in the last resort, to intellectual intrigue, 
and the power of sophistry is invoked to place man in 
the dilemma between submission to an authority which 
has lost his allegiance and the utter abandonment of his 
belief in God — a desperate policy ; for, placed between 
falsehood and the abyss, humanity has always had grace 
to choose the abyss, conscious as it is that to fly from 
falsehood, through whatever clouds and darkness, is to 
fly to the God of truth. In weighing the arguments put 
before us on these questions, let us not leave out of sight 
influences whose fatal power history has recorded in her 
bloodiest page. 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 101 

Assuming, then, that human justice is the same quality 
as divine justice, the idea of moral waste in the divine 
government, as displayed in history, is one in which we 
shall never force our hearts to acquiesce. If moral be- 
ings are wasted by the Creator, what is saved? Butler, 
indeed, suggests the analogy of physical nature, and inti- 
mates that we may resign ourselves to the waste of souls 
as we do to the waste of seeds. But in the case of the 
seed nothing is wasted but the form ; the matter remains 
indestructible ; while misery and despair there is none. 
The analogy of animals, on which Butler elsewhere 
touches in a different connection, seems more formidable. 
Here are beings sentient, to a certain extent intelligent, 
and capable of pleasure and pain like ourselves, among 
whom good and evil seem to be distributed by a blind 
fate, regardless of any merits or demerits of theirs. The 
only answer that can at present be given to the question 
thus raised seems to be this : that we are not more cer- 
tain of our own existence than we are that no fate or law 
regardless of morality rules us ; and that as to animals, 
their destiny is simply beyond our knowledge. Was 
man to be placed in the world alone? Was he to be left 
without the sentiments and the moral influences which 
spring from his relations with his mute companions and 
helpmates? Or could he, the heir of pain in this world, 
be placed amid a painless creation, without destroying 
the sympathy of things ? It may be observed, too, that 
in the state of a large portion of the animal creation there 
seems to be a progressive improvement, not taking the 
form of physical development, but depending on and 
bearing a faint analogy to the improvement of the hu- 



102 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

man race. As tlie human race spreads over the world 
and cultivates it, the carnivorous and ferocious animals 
disappear, and those more peaceful and happier tribes re- 
main which are domesticated by man. If man himself 
should become, as some seem to expect, less carnivorous 
as he grows more civilized, his relations with animals 
will of course become still more kindly, and their lot still 
better. This remark does not go far ; it applies only to 
a portion of the animal creation ; but, so far as it goes, it 
tends to prove that animals are not under blind physical 
law, but under providential care ; and it suggests a sort 
of development, if that word is to be used, very different 
from the organic development which a certain school of 
science is seeking every where to establish. Eational in- 
quiries into the nature, character, and lot of animals seem 
to be but just beginning to be made, and in their course 
they may clear up part of that which is now dark. 
Meantime, mere defect of knowledge is no stumbling- 
block. There is a faith against reason which consists in 
believing, or hypocritically pretending to believe, vital 
facts upon bad evidence, when our conscience bids us 
rest satisfied only with the best; but there is also a ra- 
tional faith which consists in trusting, where our knowl- 
edge fails, to the goodness and wisdom, which, so far as 
our knowledge extends, are found worthy of our trust. " 
Butler, while he built his whole system on analogy, de- 
clined to inquire strictly what the logical force of analogy 
was. The real ground of his great argument seems to be 
this — that the dealings of the same Being (in this instance 
the Creator) may be expected always to be the same ; 
which is true, with this momentous qualification, that the 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 103 

thing dealt with must be the same also. There is not 
only no assurance, there is not even the faintest presump- 
tion that as God deals with seeds, so He will deal with 
lives, or that, as He deals with mortal lives, so will He 
deal with immortal souls. The only analogy really ap- 
plicable to these matters seems to be that of the moral 
nature of man, on which its Maker has impressed His 
own image, and which, when at its best, and therefore 
likest Him, shrinks from the thought of moral waste, and 
if it is compelled to inflict suffering by way of punish- 
ment, does so not to destroy, but to save. The passage 
of Origen, of which Butler's analogy is an expansion, is 
taken from the literature of an age not too deep-thinking 
or too deep-feeling to endure the idea of an arbitrary 
God. To us that idea is utterly unendurable. If we 
could believe God to be arbitrary, above the throne of 
God in our hearts would be the throne of justice. If we 
translate Origen's words into philosophic language, do 
not they, and does not the argument which Butler has 
based on them, come to this — that God is bound to deal 
with the spiritual as He deals with the material world? 
And if this is true, is He not a Fate rather than a God ? 
We can not help divining, then, that the true hypoth- 
esis of history will be one which will correspond to our 
sense of justice. But where can such an hy]3othesis be 
found? Is there any color of reason for adopting a 
view of history which would suppose a deeper commu- 
nity of the human race as to its object and its destiny 
than common language implies, and which would stake 
less than is commonly assumed to be staked on the indi- 
vidual life ? 



104 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

To siicli a view seem to point all the instincts which 
lead man to sacrifice his individual life to his fellows, his 
country, and, when his vision becomes more enlarged, to 
his kind. These instincts are regardless of the state of 
moral perfection at which he whom they propel to de- 
struction has personally arrived. They do not calculate 
whether the soldier who rushes first into the breach, the 
man who plunges into a river to save one who is drown- 
ing, the physician who loses his own life in exploring an 
infectious disease, is, to use the common phrase, fit to die. 
They seem distinctly to aim at a moral object beyond 
the individual moral life, and affecting the character of 
the race. Yet, at the same time, they give strong assur- 
ance to him whose life they take that it is good for him 
to die. 

That desire of living after death in the grateful mem- 
ory of our kind, or, as we fondly call it, of immortality, 
to which the enjoyment of so many lives is sacrificed, is 
it a mere trick of nature to lure man to labor against his 
own interest for her general objects ? or does it denote a 
real connection of the generation to which the hero, the 
writer, the founder belongs with the generations that will 
succeed ? 

Again : what is it that persuades the lowest and most 
suffering classes of society, when the superiority of phys- 
ical force is on their side, to rest quiet beneath their lot, 
and forbear from breaking in with the strong hand upon 
civilization, which in its tardy progress will scarcely 
bring better times to their children's children, and has 
too plainly no better times in store for them ? Is it not 
an instinct which bids them respect the destinies of the 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 105 

race? And why should they be bidden to respect the 
destinies of the race, if those destinies are not theirs ? 

Why this close interlacing of one moral being with 
the rest in society, if, after all, each is to stand or fall 
entirely alone ? Why this succession of ages, and this 
long intricate drama of history, if all that is to be done 
could have been done as well by a single set of actors in 
a single scene ? 

If each man stood entirely alone in his moral life, un- 
supported and unredeemed by his kind, nature, the min- 
ister of eternal justice, would surely be less lavish of in- 
dividual life, and of all that is bound up in it, than she 
is. At least she would show some disposition to dis- 
criminate. Those myriads on whom, though the acci- 
dents of war, changes and failures of trade, earthquakes, 
plagues, and famines, the tower of Siloam falls, as we 
know they are not sinners above all the Gralileans, so we 
can scarcely think that they, above all the Galileans, are 
prepared to die. 

Society is the necessary medium of moral development 
to man. Yet even society, to serve its various needs, 
sacrifices to a great extent the moral development of in- 
dividual men. It is vain to say that those who are put, 
through life, to the coarsest uses, the hewers of wood and 
drawers of water to the social system, can rise to the 
highest and most refined moral ideal, though we know 
that in merit toward society they are, and are sure that 
in the eye of God they must be, equal to those who do. 
Delicacy of sentiment, which is essential to our notion of 
the moral ideal, can scarcely exist without fineness of in- 
tellect, or fineness of intellect without high mental culti- 

E2 



106 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

vation. And if we were to say that the want of that 
which high mental culture confers is no loss, we should 
stultify our own efforts to promote and elevate educa- 
tion. Even the most liberal callings carry with them an 
inherent bias scarcely compatible with the equable and 
flawless perfection which constitutes the ideal. Busy 
action and solitary thought are both necessary for the 
common service ; yet inevitable moral evils and imper- 
fections beset alike those who act in the crowd and those 
who think alone. Each profession has its point of honor, 
requisite for social purposes, but overstrained with re- 
gard to general morality, and naturally apt to be accom- 
panied by some relaxation of the man's general moral 
tone. We forgive much to a soldier for valor in the 
field, much to a judge for perfect integrity on the bench 
of justice; and we can hardly suppose that the con- 
science of the soldier or the judge will not admit into its 
decisions something of the same indulgence. Did not 
the strictest of Universities choose as her chancellor a 
man of the world, a man of pleasure, and a duelist, be- 
cause as a soldier and a citizen he had done his duty su- 
premely well ? 

Does it follow that the moral law is to be relaxed on 
any point, or that any man is to propose to himself a 
lower standard of morality in any respect ? ISTo ; it only 
follows that in forming our general views of man and his 
destiny we must limit our expectations of individual per- 
fection, and seek for compensation in the advancement 
of the kind. "We must, in the main, look for the pecul- 
iar virtues of the religious pastor elsewhere than in the 
camp or at the bar, though, when the virtues of the re- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 107 

ligious blend with those of the busy and stirring life, we 
feel that the highest aspiration of nature is fulfilled. It 
may be that advancing civilization will soften down in- 
equalities in the moral condition of men, and diminish 
the impediments to self-improvement which they pre- 
sent; but we can scarcely expect that it will efface them, 
any more than it will eiface the moral differences attend- 
ant upon difference of sex. 

In the passionate desire to reach individual perfection, 
and in the conviction that the claims of society were op- 
posed to that desire, men have fled from society and em- 
braced the monastic life. The contemplative and ascetic 
type of character alone seemed clear of all those peculiar 
flaws and deformities to which each of the worldly types 
is liable. The experiment has been tried on a large 
scale, and under various conditions ; by the Buddhist as- 
cetics ; in a higher form by the Christian monks of the 
Eastern Church ; and in a higher still by those of the 
-West. In each case the result has been decisive. The 
monks of the West long kept avenging nature at bay by 
uniting action of various kinds with asceticism and con- 
templation, but among them, too, corruption at last set 
in, and proved that this hypothesis of life and character 
was not the true one, and that humanity must relinquish 
the uniform and perfect type which formed the dream of 
a Benedict or a Francis, and descend again to variety 
and imperfection. 

Variety and imperfection are things, the first of which 
seems necessarily to involve the second. Yet the taste 
which prefers variety to sameness, even in the moral 
world, is so deeply rooted in our nature, that if taste 



108 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

means any thing, this taste would seem to have its source 
and its justification in the reality of things. 

Separate, too, entirely the destinies of man from those 
of his fellow, and you will encounter some perplexing 
questions, not to be avoided, touching the strong cases of 
natural depravity which occur among the most unfor- 
tunate of our kind. Actual idiocy may be regarded as 
destroying humanity altogether. But are there not nat- 
ural depravities, moral and intellectual, short of idiocy, 
which preclude the attainment of any high standard of 
character, and forbid us to make the moral destiny of 
these beings too dependent on the individual life ? 

Our common notions, which make the moral life so 
strictly individual, seem to depend a good deal on the be- 
lief that each man is morally not only a law, but an inde- 
pendent and perfect law to himself. But is this so ? Is 
the voice of individual conscience independent and infal- 
lible? Do we not, in doubtful cases, rectify it by con- 
sulting a friend, who represents to us the general con- 
science of mankind? Of what is it that conscience 
speaks? Is it of abstract right and wrong? Are not 
these conscience itself under another name? Moralists, 
therefore, support conscience, and give it meaning by 
identifying it with universal expediency, with the fitness 
of things, with the supreme will of the Creator. Uni- 
versal expediency and the fitness of things are ultimate 
and distant references, if they are not altogether beyond 
the range of our vision. The will of God as an object 
distinct from morality seems altogether to defy our pow- 
er of conception. "Would conscience retain its authority 
if it were not more immediately supported by human 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 109 

sympathy, love, and reverence, tlirongli whicli the Maker 
of us all speaks to each of us, and which are bestowed in 
virtue of our conformity to a type of moral character 
preserved by the opinion and affection of the race ? The 
sympathy, love, and reverence of our kind are, at all 
events, objects of a real desire and incitements to virtu- 
ous action, which the philosophic definitions of morality, 
however high-sounding, can scarcely be said to be. 

Common language divides virtues and vices into the 
social and the self-regarding. But are there any purely 
self-regarding virtues or vices ? Does not temperance fit 
us and intemperance unfit us to perform the duties of life 
toward our kind? Is it easy to preach temperance and 
denounce intemperance very powerfully except by refer- 
ence to the claims and opinion of society? Would a 
man be very clearly bound to give up an enjoyment 
which injures himself alone ? It is sometimes said of a 
good-natured spendthrift and voluptuary that he was 
only his own enemy. We have not to look far to see 
that he must have been the enemy of all about him. and 
of society. But if the statement were true it would al- 
most disarm the censure of mankind. 

The question whether virtue be enlightened and deep 
self-love, which has been rather glossed than solved, may 
perhaps be partly solved by experiment. You preach 
against incontinence, for instance, on grounds of personal 
purity, and your preaching proves not very effective. 
Try a different course. Preach against incontinence on 
the ground of pity for its victims, and see whether that 
motive will be more availing. 

That there is a complete and independent moral code 



110 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

innate in eacTi of us, is an opinion wliich it is difficult to 
hold when we see how much the special precepts of the 
moral law have been altered by social opinion for the 
best members of society in the course of history. Piracy, 
wars of conquest, dueling, for example, were once ap- 
proved by the moral code ; they are now condemned by 
the improved code which has sprung from the enlarged 
moral views and more enlightened conscience of man- 
kind. I say that the special precepts of the moral code 
are altered ; I do not say that the essence of morality 
changes. The essence of morality does not change. Its 
immutability is the bond between the hearts of Homer's 
time and ours. The past is not without its image in the 
present. Suppose a young London thief, such as Defoe 
has painted, kind-hearted, true to his comrades in danger 
and distress, making a free and generous use of his plun- 
der, and in his depredations having mercy on the poor. 
It is plain that the boy would be much better if he did 
not steal, as he will himself see, directly he is taught what 
is right. It is plain, on the other hand, that he is not a 
bad boy ; that (to apply the most practical test) you can 
neither hate nor despise him ; that, on the whole, he does 
more good than evil in the world. The evil he does 
even to property is slight, compared with that which is 
done by rich idlers and voluptuaries, since while he 
steals a little they taint it all. Not that the moral law 
does not include property as an essential precept, but 
that the essence of morality lies deeper than the special 
precepts of the moral law. 

Where the essence of morality lies, history must wait 
to be taught by ethical science. Till she is taught, it is 



ON" THE STUDY OF HISTORY. Ill 

impossible that she can form her philosophy on a sound 
basis ; and, therefore, those who are devoted to historical 
studies may be excused for impatiently desiring a more 
rational inquiry into this, the central secret of the world. 
It is not by verbal definitions, however philosophic in ap- 
pearance, that we shall ascertain what morality really is. 
We must proceed by a humbler method. Does morality 
lie in action or in character ? Do not actions, similar in 
themselves and equally voluntary, change their moral hue 
as they spring from one character or another? Are not 
crimes committed from habit at once the least voluntary 
and the most culpable ? and is not the paramount import- 
ance of character, of which habitual action is the test, the 
account of this paradox ? Is not the same action, if done 
by a character tending upward, regarded as comparative- 
ly good? if by a character tending downward, as com- 
paratively evil ? Is it not, in short, as indications of char- 
acter, and on that account only, that actions excite our 
moral emotions, as distinct from our mere sense of social 
interest ? And if this be so, is it not rather in character 
than in action that morality lies ? If it is, we must ana- 
lyze the phenomena of character by some rational meth- 
od. There are two sets of qualities, one of which excites 
our reverence, the other our love; and which tend to 
fusion in the more perfect characters, but as a character 
never reaches perfection, are never completely fused. 
What is the common ingredient of these two sets of 
qualities? What is the common element in the hero and 
the saint? What connects grandeur of character with 
grace ? What, in short, are our several moral tastes, and 
what and how related are the different points of character 



112 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

that attract and repel them ? In the case of doubtful 
characters, such as that of a Wallenstein, or that of an 
Othello, what is it that constitutes the doubt? what is it 
that turns the scale ? Which of the vices are more, which 
less, destructive of beauty of character ? and what is it 
that determines the difference of their effects ? If delib- 
erate cruelty, for instance, is the worst, the most unpar- 
donable of vices, may it not point to the prime source of 
moral excellence in the opposite pole ? These are ques- 
tions which seem at least to present rational starting- 
points for inquiry, and to be capable of being handled 
by a rational method ; and they must be rationally han- 
dled before we can construct a real philosophy of his- 
tory — perhaps it may be added, before moral philosophy 
itself can become fruitful, and pass from airy definition 
to the giving of real precepts for the treatment of our 
moral infirmities and the attainment of moral health. 
The school which regards history as the evolution of a 
physical organization under a physical law is ready with 
a multiplicity of hypotheses, furnished by the analogy 
of physical science. The school which regards history 
as the manifestation and improvement of human charac- 
ter through free action is in suspense for want of some 
sounder and more comprehensive account of human char- 
acter than has yet been supplied. 

On the other hand, history, as we have said, may lend 
light to the moral philosopher. He can not fail to be 
assisted and guided by contemplating not individual hu- 
manity only, but the whole estate of man. Some things 
become palpable on the large scale, which, in examining 
the single instance, do not come into view or may be 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 113 

overlooked. History forces on our notice, and compels 
us to take reasonably into account, the weakness, the nec- 
essary imperfections, the various and unequal lot, the con- 
straining circumstances, the short, precarious life of man. 
In history, too, besides the tragic element of human life, 
there plainly appears another element, which may not be 
without its significance. Whenever an historian gives 
us a touch of genuine humor, we recognize in it a touch 
of truth. Humor, the appreciation of what is comic in 
man and his actions, is a part of our moral nature ; it is 
founded on a kind of moral justice : it discriminates crime 
from weakness ; it tempers the horror which the offenses 
of a Louis XIV. excite, with a smile, which denotes the 
allowance due to a man taught by his false position and 
by his sycophants to play the god. In its application to 
the whole lot of man, and to the lot of each man, it may 
perhaps be thought to suggest that the drama is not pure 
tragedy, and that all is not quite so terrible or so serious 
as it seems. 

There is no doubt that all this points, not by any 
means to a lower morality, but to a somewhat lower esti- 
mate of the moral powers of individual man ; to an at- 
tainable ideal, and to the deliberate love of human char- 
acters in spite of great imperfections, if on the whole they 
have tended upward, and done, in their measure, their 
duty to their kind. And is not man more likely to strug- 
gle for that which is within than for that which is beyond 
his reach ? If you would have us mount the steep ascent, 
is it not better to show us the first step of the stairs than 
that which is nearest to the skies? If all the rhetoric of 
the pulpit were to be taken as literally true, would not 



114 ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 

society be plunged into recklessness, or dissolved in ago- 
nies of despair? A human morality saves much which 
an impracticable morality would throw away ; it readily 
accepts the tribute of moral poverty, the fragment of a 
life, the plain prosaic duty of minds incapable from their 
nature or circumstances of conceiving a high poetic ideal. 
On the other hand, it has its stricter side. It knows noth- 
ing of the merits of mere innocence. It requires active 
service to be rendered to society. It holds out no salva- 
tion by wearing of amulets or telling of beads. Eegard- 
ing man as essentially a social being, it bears hard on in- 
dolent wealth, however regular and pious ; on sinecurism 
in every sense ; on all who are content to live by the 
sweat of another man's brow. It teaches that to be un- 
derpaid is better than to be overpaid ; and that covetous- 
ness and grasping, though they may not violate the law, 
are a robbery, at once immoral and fatuous, of the com- 
mon store. 

There is little fear, let us say once more, lest any man, 
not a victim to the mad mysticism into which material- 
ism is apt to be hurried by the Nemesis of reason, should 
imagine himself divested of his distinct personality, or of 
his distinct personal responsibility, and merged in the ag- 
gregate of humanity, or in the universe of which human- 
ity is a part. It is difficult to express such reveries in 
the language of sane men. But that the human race is, 
in a real sense, one; that its efforts are common, and 
tend in some measure to a joint result; that its several 
members may stand in the eye of their Maker not only 
as individual agents, but as contributors to this joint re- 
sult, is a doctrine which our reason, perhaps, finds some- 



ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY. 115 

thing to support, and which our hearts readily accept. 
It unites us not only in sympathy, but in real interest 
v/ith the generations that are to come after us, as well as 
with those that have gone before us ; it makes each gen- 
eration, each man, a partaker in the wealth of all ; it en- 
courages us to sow a harvest which we shall reap, not 
with our hands, indeed, but by the hands of those that 
come after us ; it at once represses selfish ambition, and 
stimulates the desire of earning the gratitude of our kind ; 
it strengthens all social, and regulates all personal de- 
sires ; it limits, and, by limiting, sustains effort, and calms 
the passionate craving to grasp political perfection or 
final truth ; it fills up the fragment, gives fruitfulness to 
effort apparently wasted, and covers present failure with 
ultimate success; it turns the deaths of states, as of men, 
into incidents in one vast life, and quenches the melan- 
choly which flows from the ruins of the past — that past 
into which we too are sinking, just when great things 
seem about to come. 



ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF THE DOC- 
TRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 



In previous lectures on the " Study of History" I fully 
accepted tlie doctrine of Historical Progress. It is obvi- 
ous that the knowledge and wealth of our race increase 
and accumulate from age to age, and that their increase 
and accumulation react powerfully on the moral state of 
man. It is less obvious, but it seems not less certain, 
that our views of morality itself expand, and that our 
moral code is improved, as, by the extension of human 
intercourse, our moral relations are multiplied, and as, by 
the advancement of science and jurisprudence, they be- 
come better understood. ISTor can it easily be denied 
that this progress extends even to religion. In learning 
more of man we learn more of Him in whose image man 
was made; in learning more of the creation we learn 
more of the Creator; and every thing which in the 
course of civilization tends to elevate, deepen, and refine 
the character generally, tends to elevate, deepen, and re- 
fine it in its religious aspect. 

But then it is alleged, and even triumphantly proclaim- 
ed, that tremendous consequences follow from this doc- 
trine. If we accept historical progress, it is said, we must 



118 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

give up Christianity. Christianity, we are told, like oth- 
er phases of the great onward movement of humanity, 
has had its place, and that a great place, in history. In 
its allotted epoch it was progressive in the highest de- 
gree, and immense veneration and gratitude are due to it 
on that account ; but, like other phases of the same move- 
ment, it had its appointed term. That term it has already 
exceeded. It has already become stationary, and even 
retrograde ; it has begun, instead of being the beneficent 
instrument, to be the arch-enemy of human progress. It 
cumbers the earth ; and the object of all honest, scientific, 
free-thinking men, who are lovers of their kind, should 
be to quicken the death-pangs into which it has mani- 
festly fallen, and remove once for all this obstruction to 
the onward movement of the race. Confusion and dis- 
tress will probably attend the final abandonment of " the 
popular religion ;" but it is better at once to encounter 
them, than to keep up any longer an imposture which is 
disorganizing and demoralizing to society, as well as de- 
grading to the mind of man. " Let us at once, by a cour- 
ageous effort, say farewell to our old faith, and, by a still 
more courageous effort, find ourselves a new one!" A 
gallant resolution, and one which proves those who have 
taken it to be practical believers in free-will, and redeems 
them from the reproach of admitting the logical conse- 
quences of their own doctrines touching the necessary 
progress of humanity by way of development and under 
the influence of invariable laws. If history grows like a 
vegetable, or like the body of an animal, no effort of 
courage can be needed, or avail to direct its growth. We 
have only to let well or ill alone. 



THE DOCTEINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 119 

The notion that Christianity is at this moment mani- 
festly in an expiring state, or, to use the favorite lan- 
guage of the sect, that " the popular religion has entered 
on its last phase," is perhaps partly produced by the re- 
form, or attempted reform, of Christian doctrine which is 
at present going on. This movement is supposed to be 
an exact parallel to the attempt made by the later Pla- 
tonists to rationalize the popular mythology of Grreece, 
and equally ominous of approaching dissolution to the 
superstition with which its more philosophic adherents 
found it necessary thus desperately to deal. The analo- 
gy would be more just if the later Platonists, instead of 
endeavoring to bring a sensual superstition to the level 
of the age by violently importing into it a spiritual phi- 
losophy, had endeavored to restore it to its primitive and 
most sensual simplicity. Though even in that case it 
would not be certain, without farther proof, that because 
the attempt to reform Polytheism had failed, Christianity 
must be incapable of reform. Historical analogy, as an 
interpreter of present events, has its uses, and it has also 
its limits. Christianity supposes that with its Founder 
something new came into the world. The King of Siam 
may, after all, be about, in contradiction to the whole of 
his experience, to see the water freeze. 

If, however, they to whom I allude have rightly read 
the present by the light of the past ; if, as they say, a 
sound and free philosophy of history distinctly points to 
the approaching departure of Christianity from the world, 
a terrible crisis has indeed arrived, and one which might 
well be expected to strike their rhetorical exultation 
dumb. They admit, I believe, that religion, or whatever 



120 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

stands in the place of it, is the very core, centre, and vital 
support of our social and political organization ; so that 
without a religion the civil tie would be loosened, person- 
al would completely prevail over public motives, selfish 
ambition and cupidity would break loose in all directions, 
and society and the body politic would be in danger of 
dissolution. They cry aloud, as I have said, that Chris- 
tianity being exploded, a new religion must be produced 
in order to save humanity from ruin and despair. Now 
to produce a new religion off-hand, and that at a moment 
of the most appalling peril, and consequently of the great- 
est mental agony and distraction, is an achievement which 
even the most extreme believers in free-will and self-ex- 
ertion would scarcely think possible to man. I am not 
aware that so much as the rudiment of a new religion has 
yet been actually produced, unless it be the Humanitari- 
an religion of M. Comte, which is merely a mad travestie 
of the Eoman Catholic Church, and from which even the 
disciples of the Comtist philosophy, if they have any sense 
of the grotesque remaining, turn away in despair. Thus 
the law of human development, instead of being, like the 
laws discovered by science, regular and beneficent, the 
just object of our confidence as well as of our admiration, 
has failed abruptly, and brought humanity to the brink 
of an abyss. 

It is my strong conviction that history has arrived at 
no such crisis ; that the indications of historical philos- 
ophy have been misunderstood, and that they do not 
point to the impending fall, but rather to the approach- 
ing regeneration of Christendom. I do not think that 
we should refuse to consider, in this lecture-room, a ques- 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 121 

tion which lies at the very root of the philosophy of 
history, merely because it happens also to be of the 
highest practical importance. I propose, therefore, to 
add a few remarks on this point, by way of supplement 
to the two general lectures on the "Study of History," 
in which the Doctrine of Historical Progress has been 
maintained. 

In the first place, we are struck by the fact that sus- 
tained historical progress has not been universal, as those 
against whom I am arguing always assume, but has been 
confined to Christian nations. For a short time the Mo- 
hammedan nations seemed to advance, not merely in 
conquering energy, but in civilization. They have even 
been set up as the moral rivals of Christendom by those 
who are anxious that Christendom should not appear to 
be without a rival. But their progress was greatest where 
they were most immediately in contact with Christianity, 
and it has long since ended in utter corruption and irrev- 
ocable decay. Where is the brilliant monarchy of Ha- 
roun Alraschid ? How ephemeral was it compared even 
with that old Byzantine Empire into whose frame Chris- 
tianity had infused a new life under the very ribs of 
death ; a life which even the fatal bequest of Eoman des- 
potism, extending itself to the Church as well as to the 
State, could scarcely quench, and which, through ages of 
Mohammedan oppression, has smouldered on beneath the 
ashes, to burst out again in reviving Greece. Even in 
the Moorish communities of Spain, the flower as they 
were of Mohammedan civilization, internal corruption 
had prepared the way for the conquering arms of Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella. Mohammedanism, however, whatev- 

F 



122 ON SOME SUPPOSED COIn^SEQUENCES OF 

er the degree of progressive energy displayed by it may 
have been, was not a separate and independent religion, 
but a debased offspring of Judaism and Christianity. 
From the intercourse of its founder vwith Jews and 
Christians it derived the imposing monotheism which 
has been its strength both as a conquering power and as 
a system of civilization ; while the want of a type of 
character, such as Christianity possesses, has been in ev- 
ery sense its fatal weakness. Turning to the remoter 
East, we find that its history has not been a history of 
progress, but of the successive descents of conquering 
races from the more bracing climate of the North, subju- 
gating the languid inhabitants of the plains, and found- 
ing a succession of empires, sometimes mighty and gor- 
geous, but always barren of nobler fruits, which, when 
the physical energy of the conquering race was spent in 
its turn, at once fell into decay. The semblance of prog- 
ress, in short, has been but a semblance, due merely to 
fresh infusions of animal vigor, not to any sustaining 
principle of moral life. China advanced at an early pe- 
riod to a certain point of material civilization ; but, hav- 
ing reached that point, she became a by-word of immo- 
bility, as Egypt, the ancient China, was in a former day. 
This immemorial stagnation seems now about to end in 
total dissolution, unless Christian nations should infuse a 
regenerating influence from without. The civilization 
of Mexico is deplored by certain philosophers, who seem 
to think that, had its career not been cut short by Span- 
ish conquest, it might have attained a great height, and 
confirmed their views of history. But what reason is 
there to think that Mexico would ever have advanced 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 123 

beyond great buildings erected by slave labor, human 
sacrifices, and abominable vices ? Again, we are told 
that the Christian view of history must be narrow and 
false, because it does not include in its theory of human 
progress the great negro and fetichist populations of Af- 
rica. But we ought to be informed what part the negro 
and fetichist populations of Africa have really played in 
the progress of humanity, or how the invariable law of 
spontaneous development through a certain series of in- 
tellectual and social conditions which we are told gov- 
erns the history of all nations, has been verified in their 
.case. The progress of ancient Greece and Eome was 
real and high while it lasted, and Christianity has re- 
ceived its fruits into herself Its moral sources deserve 
to be more accurately explored than they have yet been ; 
but in both cases it came to an end at the moment of its 
apparent culmination from internal causes and without 
hope of renewal. In both cases it sank under an empire, 
the Macedonian in one case, that of the Caesars in the 
other, which, whatever it may have been in its effects on 
humanity at large, was certainly the grave of republican 
virtue. 

It is confidently said that the historical progress of the 
most advanced nations of Europe during recent times 
has been beyond the pale of Christendom, and that it 
forms a conclusive proof of the exhaustion and decline 
of Christianity. The intellect of Protestant Germany, 
which has played so momentous a part in the historical 
progress of the last century, is triumphantly cited as a 
palpable instance of this fact. There is much which to 
the eye of the theologian, looking to religious professions, 



124 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

is without the pale of Christendom, but which to the his- 
torical eye, looking to moral connections, is still within 
it. That increase of infidelity, which is spoken of with 
so much alarm on one side, and so much exultation on 
the other, theologically viewed, is no doubt great, espe- 
cially if we look not to mere numbers, but to intellectual 
cultivation and influence ; but, viewed morally, it is, con- 
sidering the distractions of Christendom, surprisingly 
small. Great masses of intelligence and eminent leaders 
of thought in all departments have been nominally and 
outwardly estranged from Christendom by the divisions 
of the churches; by the rending of the truth and of the 
means of religious influence between them ; by the bar- 
ren and impotent dogmatism into which, through their 
rivalries and controversies, they are perpetually driving 
each other; by the sinister alliances of some of them with 
political obstructiveness and injustice; by the apparent 
conflict which their pretensions create between the claims 
of reason and those of religious faith ; by the false ground 
which some of them have taken in regard to the discov- 
eries of science and historical philosophy ; and most of 
all, perhaps, by the contradiction which their mutual de- 
nunciations produce between the palpable facts of our 
common morality and the supposed judgments of relig- 
ion. But it will be found, on closer inspection, that these 
apparent seceders from Christendom remain Christians in 
their whole view of the world, of God, of the human 
character and destinies ; speak a language and appeal to 
principles and sympathies essentially Christian; draw 
their moral life from the Christendom which surrounds 
them ; receive their wives at Christian altars, and bring 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 125 

up their children in the Christian faith. Many a great 
writer who is brought forward as a proof that the intel- 
lect of the age is Christian no longer, will be found, on 
examination, to have nothing in his writings which is 
not derived from a Christian source. Schleiermacher ap- 
pears to be hailed as one of those who, by their criticisms, 
have pronounced the doom of the "popular religion:" 
Schleiermacher received the Eucharist on his death-bed, 
and died declaring that he had adhered to the living 
spirit of Christianity rather than to the dead letter. He 
may have been illogical, but he can not be said, historic- 
ally, not to have been a Christian. 

In France, perhaps, alone, owing to peculiar disasters, 
not the least of which was the hypocritical re-establish- 
ment of Eoman Catholicism by the statecraft of ISTapo- 
leon, a really great estrangement of the jDcople from 
Christianity has taken place. And what are the conse- 
quences of the estrangement to the progress of this great 
nation, which not a century ago was intellectually at the 
head of Europe, which seemed by her efforts to have 
opened a new era of social justice for mankind, and 
which the atheistical school desire now, in virtue of her 
partial atheism, to erect into the president and arbitress 
of the civilized world? The consequences are a form of 
government, not created by a supreme effort of modern 
intellect, but borrowed from that of declining Eome, 
which, bereft of Christian hope, immolates the future to 
the present ; a despairing abandonment of personal lib- 
erty and freedom of opinion ; a popular literature of 
heathen depravity; and a loss of moral objects of inter- 
est, while military glory and material aggrandizement 



126 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

are worshiped in their place. If this state of things is 
progressive, what is retrograde ? 

There are three great elements of human progress, the 
moral, the intellectual, and the productive, or virtue, 
knowledge, and industry. But these three elements, 
though distinct, are not separate, but closely connected 
with each other. There is a moral element in every 
good production of industry ; while, on the other hand, 
the works of intellect and the productions of industry 
exercise a vast influence on our moral condition. It 
was contended in a former lecture that the moral element 
of progress was the cardinal element of the three ; the 
direction of the intellect to good objects, which leads to 
the attainment of useful knowledge, and the self-exertion 
and self-denial which constitute industry, beiug determ- 
ined by morality, without which the intellectual and pro- 
ductive powers of man would be aimless and wandering 
forces, working at random good and evil. It was also 
contended that the formation of good moral character, 
the only object which comprehends all the rest, and 
which all human actions, discoveries, and productions 
promote and subserve, was the final end of all human ef- 
fort, the ultimate mark and goal of human progress, and 
the true key to history. If these positions are sound, the 
main questions, in determining the ultimate relation be- 
tween Christianity and human progress, will be, whether 
the Christian morality is sound and universal, and wheth- 
er the Christian type of character is perfect and final. It 
is only if the Christian morality is not sound and univer- 
sal that it can be discarded or transcended by the moral 
progress of the race. It is only if the type of character 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 127 

consecrated in the Grospels is not perfect and final that 
its consecration can ever interfere with the aspirations of 
humanity advancing toward the goal of purity and per- 
fection. These are the main questions; we shall also 
have to consider whether Christianity conflicts with or 
discourages any special kind of human progress, intel- 
lectual or industrial. 

What is the root and essence of moral character? 
What is it that connects together all those moral habits 
which we call the virtues, and warrants ns in giving 
them the collective name of virtue ? Courage, chastity, 
and generosity are, at first sight, three different things : 
in what respect is it that they are one? What is the 
common element of moral attraction in all that vast va- 
riety of character, regular or irregular, severe or tender, to 
which, in history and life, our hearts are drawn ? Some 
one principle there must surely be which traverses all 
this uniform diversity, some one principle which our 
hearts would recognize, not as a mere intellectual specu- 
lation, but as the real spring of moral endeavor in them- 
selves. And if there be such a principle, it will, on our 
hypothesis, be the key at once to the life of individual 
man and to the history of the race. It will contain in it 
not only a true moral philosophy, but a true philosophy 
of history. 

Now, whatever mystery may shroud the ultimate source 
of our moral being, thus much seems tolerably certain, 
that the seat of the moral principle in our nature is indi- 
cated and covered by the quality to which, according to 
the intensity of its manifestation, we give various names, 
ranging from benevolence to self-sacrifice. There is, I 



128 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

apprehend, no special virtue wliicli is not capable of be- 
ing resolved into this. To take those which appear least 
obviously identical with benevolence — courage, temper- 
ance, and chastity. Courage, when it is a virtue, is the 
sacrifice of our personal safety to the interests of our kind, 
which rises to its highest pitch in the case of martyrdom. 
Temperance fits us, while intemperance unfits us, to per- 
form our duty to society, and spares, while intemperance 
wastes, the common store. Chastity is, in like manner, a 
sacrifice of the selfish animal passions to the social prin- 
ciple, since the indulgence of lust both involves the cor- 
ruption and misery of its victims, and destroys in the man 
who indulges it the capacity for pure affection. We need 
not here discuss the question whether there is any virtue 
which is solely and purely self-regarding. If there is, its 
good effects must end with the individual life ; it can not 
be one of the springs of human progress. 

Benevolence may of course take as many special forms 
and produce as great a variety of benevolent characters 
as there are social and unselfish objects in the world. It 
may be the advocacy of a particular cause or principle ; 
it may be the pursuit of a particular ideal : both the cause 
or principle and the ideal being matters of common in- 
terest, and tending to the common good. It may be the 
devotion to science or art, as the instruments of human 
improvement and happiness, which forms the moral side 
of the intellectual life. It may be extended in its scope 
to the whole human race, and labor for the universal 
good of man ; or it may be limited to the narrow circle 
of a nation, a guikl, a family, through whom, however, it 
does indirectly and unconsciously embrace mankind. It 



THE DOCTKINE OF HIST^KICAL PEOGRESS. 129 

is sure to be affected, and almost sure to be somewhat 
distorted in its special character by the position of each 
man in life, and to show itself as a peculiar self-devotion 
to country in the case of the good soldier, and as a pe- 
culiar self-devotion to the interests of justice in the case 
of the good judge. Hence arise a multiplicity of deriva- 
tive and secondary virtues, and an infinite variety of char- 
acters, of each of which some derivative and secondary 
virtue is the peculiar stamp. But, multiform as these 
virtues and characters are, it will be found that they are 
uniform also ; that, upon examination, they may all be 
reduced to benevolence in one or other of its various de- 
grees ; and that on this principle the moral philosopher 
and the educator, if they would attain to real results, must 
take their stand. In the same manner, I apprehend that 
the approbation and affection which benevolence obtains 
for us, these, and not any thing more individual or more 
transcendental, are the real earthly assurance and support 
of virtue, the earthly object of virtuous endeavors, the 
supreme happiness of our earthly life. What these fore- 
shadow, and how they foreshadow it, is not a fit subject 
of inquiry here ; but certainly the Gospel holds out a so- 
cial, not an individual heaven. 

In a former lecture the question was raised whether 
morality lies in action or in character, and whether our 
approbation of moral actions is translated from action to 
character, or from character to action. Some reasons 
were given for inclining to believe that it is in character 
rather than in action that morality lies. It is said, on the 
other hand, that character is only a formed disposition to 
act in a particular way, and that our approbation attaches 

F 2 



180 ox SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

to good character only as the source, actual or presump- 
tive, of good action. I reply, that character is not only a 
disposition to act, it is a disposition to feel and to partici- 
pate in certain emotions — emotions which are sometimes 
incapable of being translated into action. You would not 
say that a man's character was perfect who should be in- 
capable of sympathizing in the emotions produced by the 
most glorious or the most tender visions of nature, and 
yet what special action can flow from such sympathies 
as these? Does the presence of a beloved friend give 
us pleasure merely as implying a likelihood of his active 
beneficence ? And, again, what presumption of active be- 
neficence can there be in the case of the dead, our affec- 
tion for whose characters often survives the grave ? This 
passive element in character, generally called sensibility, 
seems to be a main source of poetry and art, which play 
so important a part in human life and history. Now a 
character formed on benevolence, as it implies not only 
action, but affection and the power of sympathj^, does em- 
brace a passive as well as an active element, or rather it 
presents a passive as well as an active phase, and in this 
respect again it seems to be perfect, universal, and final. 
A character formed on the moral basis propounded by 
Gibbon, the love of pleasure and the love of action, would 
fail, among other things, in not having a sympathetic side. 
ISTow Christianity rests on one fundamental moral 
principle as the complete basis of a perfect moral char- 
acter, that principle being The love of our Neighbor, 
another name for Benevolence. And the Type of Char- 
acter set forth in the Gospel history is an absolute em- 
bodiment of Love both in the way of action and affec- 



THE DOCTEINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 131 

tion, crowned by the highest possible exhibition of it in 
an act of the most transcendent self-devotion to the in- 
terest of the human race. This being the case, it is dif- 
ficult to see how the Christian morality can ever be 
brought into antagonism with the moral progress of 
mankind, or how the Christian type of character can 
ever be left behind by the course of human development, 
lose the allegiance of the moral world, or give place to a 
newly emerging and higher ideal. This type, it would 
appear, being perfect, will be final. It will be final, not 
as precluding future history, but as comprehending it. 
The moral efforts of all ages to the consummation of the 
world will be efforts to realize this character, and to 
make it actually, as it is potentially, universal. While 
these efforts are being carried on under all the various 
circumstances of life and society, and under all the vari- 
ous moral and intellectual conditions attaching to partic- 
ular men, an infinite variety of characters, personal and 
national, will be produced ; a variety ranging from the 
highest human grandeur down to the very verge of the 
grotesque. But these characters, with all their varia- 
tions, will go beyond their source and their ideal only as 
the rays of light go beyond the sun. Humanity, as it 
passes through phase after phase of the historical move- 
ment, may advance indefinitely in excellence, but its ad- 
vance will be an indefinite approximation to the Chris- 
tian Type. A divergence from that type, to whatever 
extent it may take place, will not be progress, but de- 
basement and corruption. In a moral point of view, in 
short, the world may abandon Christianity, but it can 
never advance beyond it. This is not a matter of au- 



132 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

thority, or even of Eevelation. If it is true, it is a mat- 
ter of reason as much as any thing in the world. 

There are many peculiarities arising out of personal 
and historical circumstances which are incident to the 
best human characters, and which would prevent any 
one of them from being universal or final as a type. 
But the Type set up in the Gospels as the Christian 
Type seems to have escaped all these peculiarities, and 
to stand out in unapproached purity as well as in unap- 
proached perfection of moral excellence. 

The good moral characters which we see among men 
fall, speaking broadly, into two general classes — those 
which excite our reverence and those which excite our 
love. These two classes are essentially identical, since 
the object of our reverence is that elevation above selfish 
objects, that dignity, majesty, nobleness, appearance of 
moral strength which is produced by a disregard of self- 
ish objects in comparison of those which are of a less 
selfish and therefore of a grander kind. But, though es- 
sentially identical, they form, as it were, two hemispheres 
in the actual world of moral excellence ; the noble and 
the amiable, or, in the language of moral taste, the grand 
and the beautiful. Being, however, essentially identical, 
they constantly tend to fusion in the human characters 
which are nearest to perfection, though, no human char- 
acter being perfect, they are never actually fused. Now, 
if the type proposed in the Gospels for our imitation 
were characteristically noble or characteristically amia- 
ble, characteristically grand or characteristically beauti- 
ful, it might have great moral attractions, but it would 
not be universal or final. It would belong to one pecnl- 



THE DOCTEINE OF HISTOEICAL PEOGRESS. 133 

iar hemispliere of character, and even though man might 
not yet actually have transcended it, the ideal would lie 
beyond it ; it would not remain forever the mark and 
goal of our moral progress. But the fact is, it is neither 
characteristically noble and grand, nor characteristically 
amiable and beautiful ; but both in an equal degree, per- 
fectly and indistinguishably, the fusion of the two classes 
of qualities being complete, so that the mental eye, 
though it be strained to aching, can not discern whether 
that on which it gazes be more the object of reverence 
or of love. 

There are differences again between the male and fe- 
male character, under which, nevertheless, we divine that 
there lies a real identity, and a consequent tendency to 
fusion in the ultimate ideal. Had the Gospel type of 
character been stamped with the peculiar marks of either 
sex, we should have felt that there was an ideal free from 
those peculiarities beyond it. But this is not the case. 
It exhibits, indeed, the peculiarly male virtue of courage 
in the highest degree, and in the form in which it is most 
clear of mere animal impetuosity and most evidently a 
virtue; but this form is the one common to both sexes, 
as the annals of martyrdom prove. The Eoman Catho- 
lics have attempted to consecrate a female type, that of 
the Virgin, by the side of that which they take to be 
characteristically male. But the result obviously is a 
mutilation of the original type, which really contained 
all that the other is supposed to supply, and the creation 
of a second type which has nothing distinctive, but is in 
its attributes, as well as in its history, merely a pale and 
partial reflection of the first. 



134 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

There is an equally notable absence of any of the pe- 
culiarities whicli attend particular callings and modes of 
life, and wbich, though so inevitable under the circum- 
stances of human society that we have learned to think 
them beauties, would disqualify a Character for being 
universal and the ideal. The life depicted in the Gospel 
is one of pure beneficence, disengaged from all peculiar 
social circumstances, yet adapted to all. In vain would 
the Eoman Catholic priest point to it as an example of a 
state like his own ; the circumstances of Christ's life and 
mission repel any inferences of the kind. 

The Christian Type of Character, if it was constructed 
by human intellect, was constructed at the confluence of 
three races, the Jewish, the Greek, and the Eoman, each 
of which had strong national peculiarities of its own. A 
single touch, a single taint of any one of those peculiari- 
ties, and the character would have been national, not 
universal ; transient, not eternal : it might have been the 
highest character in history, but it would have been dis- 
qualified for being the ideal. Supposing it to have been 
human, whether it were the effort of a real man to attain 
moral excellence, or a moral imagination of the writers 
of the Gospels, the chances, surely, were infinite against 
its escaping any tincture of the fanaticism, formalism, and 
exclusiveness of the Jew, of the political pride of the Eo- 
man, of the intellectual pride of the Greek. Yet it has 
entirely escaped them all. 

Historical circumstances affect character sometimes di- 
rectly, sometimes by way of reaction. The formalism of 
the Pharisees might have been expected to drive any 
character with which it was brought into collision into 



THE DOCTKINE OF HISTOEICAL PROGRESS. 135 

tlie opposite extreme of laxity ; yet no such effect can be 
discerned. Antinomianism is clearly a deflection from the 
Christian pattern, and the offspring of a subsequent age. 

The political circumstances of Judgea, as a country suf- 
fering from the oppression of foreign conquerors, were 
calculated to produce in the oppressed Jews either insur- 
rectionary violence (which was constantly breaking out) 
or the dull apathy of Oriental submission. But the Life 
which is the example of Christians escaped both these 
natural impressions. It was an active and decisive attack 
on the evils of the age ; but the attack was directed, not 
against political tyranny or its agents, but against the 
moral corruption which was its source. 

There are certain qualities which are not virtues in 
themselves, but are made virtues by time and circum- 
stance, and with their times and circumstances pass away, 
yet, while they last, are often naturally and almost neces- 
sarily esteemed above those virtues which are most real 
and universal. These factitious virtues are the offspring 
for the most part of early states of society, and the at- 
tendant narrowness of moral vision. Such was headlong 
valor among the IN'orthmen. Such was, and is, punctilious 
hospitality among the tribes of the Desert. Such was the 
fanatical patriotism of the ancients, which remained a vir- 
tue, while the nation remained the largest sphere of moral 
sympathy known to man — his vision not having yet em- 
braced his kind. The taint of one of these factitious and 
temporary virtues would, in the eye of historical philoso- 
phy, have been as fatal to the perfection and universality 
of a type of character as the taint of a positive vice. Not 
only the fellow- countrymen, but the companions and 



136 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

apostles of Christ were, by the account of the Gospels, 
imbued with that Jewish patriotism, the fanatical intensi- 
ty of which disgusted even the ancient world. They de- 
sired to convert their Master into a patriot chief, and to 
turn His universal mission into one for the peculiar bene- 
fit of His own race. Had they succeeded in doing so, even 
in the slightest degree — or, to take a different hypothesis, 
had those who constructed the mythical character of Christ 
admitted into it the slightest tinge of a quality which they 
could hardly, without a miracle, distinguish from a real 
virtue — the time would have arrived when, the vision of 
man being enlarged, and his affection for his country be- 
coming subordinate to his affection for his kind, the Chris- 
tian Type would have grown antiquated, and would have 
been left behind in the progress of history toward a high- 
er and ampler ideal. But such is not the case. A just 
affection for country may indeed find its prototype in Him 
who wept over the impending destruction of Jerusalem, 
and who offered the Gospel first to the Jew, but His char- 
acter stands clear of the narrow partiality which it is the 
tendency of advancing civilization to discard. From ex- 
aggerated patriotism and from exaggerated cosmopolitan- 
ism the Christian Example is equally free. 

Asceticism, again, if it has never been a virtue, even 
under exceptional circumstances, is very easily mistaken 
for one, and has been almost universally mistaken for one 
in the East. There are certain states of society — such, for 
example, as that which the Western monks were called 
upon to evangelize and civilize by their exertions — in 
which it is difficult to deny the usefulness and merit of 
an ascetic life. But, had the type of character set before 



THE DOCTEINE OF HISTOEICAL PKOGRESS. 137 

US in the Gospel been ascetic, our social experience must 
liave discarded it in the long run, as our moral experience 
would have discarded it in the long run had it been con- 
nected with those formal observances into the consecra- 
tion of which asceticism almost inevitably falls. But the 
type of character set before us in the Gospels is not ascet- 
ic, though it is the highest exhibition of self-denial. Nor 
is it connected with formal observances, though, for rea- 
sons which are of universal and permanent validity, it 
provisionally condescends to the observances established 
in the Jewish Church. The character of the Essenes, as 
painted by Josephus, which seems to outvie the Christian 
character in jDurity and self-denial, is tainted both with 
asceticism and formalism, and, though a lofty and pure 
conception, could not have been accepted by man as per- 
manent and universal. 

Cast your eyes over the human characters of history, 
and observe to how great an extent the most soaring and 
eccentric of them are the creatures of their country and 
their age. Examine the most poetic of human visions, 
and mark how closely they are connected, either by way 
of direct emanation or of reaction, with the political and 
social circumstances amidst which they were conceived ; 
how manifestly the Utopia of Plato is an emanation from 
the Spartan commonwealth, how manifestly the Utopia 
of Kousseau is a reaction against the artificial society of 
Paris. What likelihood, then, was there that the imag- 
ination of a peasant of Galilee would spring at a bound 
beyond place and time, and create a type of character per- 
fectly distinct in its personality, yet entirely free from all 
that entered into the special personalities of the age ; a 



138 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

type which satisfies us as entirely as it satisfied him, and 
which, as far as we can see or imagine, will satisfy all men 
to the end of time. 

The character of Mohammed, and the character which 
is represented by the name of Buddha, were no doubt 
great improvements in their day on any thing which had 
preceded them among the races out of which they arose. 
But the character of Mohammed was deeply tainted with 
fierce Arab enterprise, that of Buddha with languid East- 
ern resignation ; and all progress among the nations by 
which these types were consecrated has long since come 
to an end. 

M. Comte has constructed for his sect a whimsical Cal- 
endar of historic characters, in imitation of the Eoman 
Catholic Calendar of Saints. Each month and each day 
is given to the historic representative of some great 
achievement of Humanity. Theocracy is there, repre- 
sented by Moses, ancient poetry by Homer, ancient phi- 
losophy by Aristotle, Eoman Civilization by Csesar, Feud- 
al Civilization by Charlemagne, and so forth ; the ancient 
Saints having their modern counterparts, and each hav- 
ing a crowd of minor Saints belonging to the same de- 
partment of historical progress in his train. Catholicism 
is there, represented somewhat strangely by St. Paul in- 
stead of St. Peter. Christianity is not there, neither is 
Christ. It can not be asserted that a person circumstan- 
tially mentioned by Tacitus is less historical than Prome- 
theus, Orpheus, and Numa, who all appear in this Calen- 
dar ; and the allegation that there is no Christianity but 
Catholicism, and that St. Paul, not Christ, was its real 
founder, is too plainly opposed to facts to need discus- 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL TROGRESS. 139 

sion. The real reason, I apprehend, is that Christianity 
and its Anthor, though nnquestionably historical, have 
no peculiar historical characteristics, and no limited place 
in history. And are we to believe that men whose cul- 
ture was so small, and whose range of vision was neces- 
sarily so limited as those of the first Christians, produced 
a character which a French atheist philosopher of the 
nineteenth century finds himself unable to treat as hu- 
man, and place, in its historical relations, among the hu- 
man benefactors of the race ? I)o you imagine that it is 
from respect for the feelings of Christian society that M. 
Comte hesitates to put this name into his Calendar be- 
side the names of Coesar and Frederick the Great ? The 
treatise in which the Calendar is given opens with an 
announcement that M. Comte, by a decisive proclama- 
tion, made at what he is pleased to style the memorable 
conclusion of his course of lectures, has inaugurated the 
reign of Humanity and put an end to the reign of God. 

The essence of man's moral nature, clothed with a per- 
sonality so vivid and intense as to excite through all 
ages the most intense affection, yet divested of all those 
peculiar characteristics, the accidents of place and time, 
by which human personalities are marked — what other 
notion than this can philosophy form of Divinity mani- 
fest on earth ? 

The acute and candid author of " The Soul" and the 
"Phases of Faith" has felt, though he has not clearly ex- 
pressed, the critical importance of this question. He has 
felt that a perfect type of character was the essence of a 
practical religion, and that, if the Christian type was per- 
fect, it would be hopeless to set up a new religion beside 



140 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

it. Accordingly, lie tries to point out imperfections in 
the character of Christ, and the imperfections which he 
points out are two in number. The first is the exhibi- 
tion of indignation against the hypocritical and soul- 
murdering tyranny of the Pharisees. This is surely a 
strange exception to be taken by one who is himself a 
generous denouncer of tyranny and oppression. I have 
little doubt that, had no indignation against sanctimoni- 
ous crime been exhibited, its absence would have been 
seized upon as a proof of imperfect humanity. The sec- 
ond defect alleged is the absence of mirth, and of laugh- 
ter as its natural and genial manifestation. This objec- 
tion, though it grates strangely on our ears, is not unrea- 
sonable. Mirth is a real part of our moral nature, sig- 
nificant as well as the rest. The great ministers of pure 
and genial mirth, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Moliere, have 
fulfilled a moral mission of mercy and justice as well as 
of pleasure to mankind, and have their place of honor in 
history with the other great benefactors of the race. 
And, on the other hand, the attempts to expel mirth from 
human life and character made by certain austere sects 
have resulted not only in moroseness, but in actual de- 
pravity. If this element of good in history is really 
alien to the Christian type, the Christian type is imper- 
fect ; we shall have a moral life beside it and beyond it, 
and at a certain point we shall become aware of its im- 
perfection, and our absolute allegiance to it will cease. 
But, before determining this question, the objector would 
have done well to inquire what mirth really was; wheth- 
er it was a radically distinct feeling, or only a phase of 
feeling ; and whether laughter was of its essence or only 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 141 

an accident? Mirth, pity, and contempt seem to be three 
emotions which are all excited by human weakness. To 
weakness add suffering, and mirth is turned to pity ; add 
vice, and mirth is turned to contempt. Mirth itself is 
excited by weakness alone, which it discriminates alike 
from the weakness of vice on the one hand, and from 
weakness attended by suffering on the other. The ex- 
pression of contempt is a sarcastic laughter, akin to the 
laughter of mirth, and the milder form of pity betrays 
itself in a smile. There is, moreover, evidently a close 
connection between laughter and tears. Pity, not mirth, 
would be the characteristic emotion of one who was 
brought habitually into contact with the weakness of hu- 
manity in the form of suffering ; but the same power of 
sympathy would render him capable of genial mirth if 
brought into contact with weakness in a merely gro- 
tesque and comic form. According as the one or the 
other was his lot, his character would take a brighter or 
a sadder hue ; but we can not help feeling that the lot 
of m.an here having more in it of the painful than of the 
laughable, the sadder character is the more sympathetic, 
the more human, and the deeper of the two. That a 
feeling for human weakness is wanting in the type of 
Character presented to us by the Gospels will hardly be 
affirmed, though the feelings take the sadder and deeper 
form, the gayer and brighter form being obviously ex- 
cluded by the circumstances of the case, as the Gospel 
history sets it forth. Perhaps, indeed, the exclusion is 
not so absolute but that a trace of the happier emotion 
may be discerned. Just at the point where human mirth 
passes into pity there is a shade of tender irony, which 



142 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

forms the good element of the whole school of sentiment- 
al humorists, such as Sterne and Carlyle, and which has 
for its exciting cause the littleness and frailty of man's 
estate. This shade of irony is perhaps just perceptible 
in such passages as that which compares the laborious 
glory of Solomon with the unlabored beauty of the lilies 
of the field, a passage by which Mr. Carlyle is strongly 
attracted, and in which he evidently recognizes the root 
of that which is true in his own view of the world. It 
would seem then that mirth, humor, the great masters 
of mirth and humor, and the whole of that element in 
the estate and history of man, are not beyond the Chris- 
tian type of character, but within it. 

Mr. Newman has attempted to deny not only that 
the Christian type of Character is perfect, but that it is 
unique. What character then in history is its equal? 
If a rival can be found, the allegiance of humanity may 
be divided or transferred. Mr. Newman fixes, evidently 
with some misgiving, and without caring accurately to 
verify a youthful recollection, on the character of Fletch- 
er of Madeley. Fletcher's character was no doubt one 
of remarkable beauty, and certainly not wanting in right- 
eous indignation against Pharisees. But, being that of 
an Evangelical Divine, it was produced, not independent- 
ly, but by a constant imitation of the Character of Christ. 
Mr. Newman should have gone elsewhere for an inde- 
pendent instance ; to the School of Socrates, to the School 
of Roman Stoicism, to the Court and Camp of Bonaparte. 
He knows history too well. 

The truth is, that Sectarianism has narrowed not only 
the pale of Christianity, but the type of Christian charac- 



THE DOCTKINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 143 

ter, and made men think of it as a rigid, austere, priestly, 
or puritanic mould, shutting out the varied grandeur, 
beauty, and beneficence of history, so that a schism has 
been produced between the consecrated type and the 
heart of man. There are in history a multitude of mixed 
characters, often of a very fascinating kind. In these 
we must separate the good from the evil before we pro- 
nounce that the good does not belong to Christianity. I 
will take a mixed character which I have more than 
once used as an illustration before, and to which all his- 
torians have been strongly attracted in spite of its great 
defects — the character of Wallenstein. If that which is 
a real object of moral admiration in Wallenstein can be 
shown to be Christian, as crucial an experiment as it is 
easy to devise will have been successfully performed. 
But we must begin by examining the character closely, 
and set aside those parts of it which are not the real ob- 
jects of moral admiration. In the first place, we must 
set aside the mere irregularity, which has in it nothing 
moral, but by which we are fascinated in no slight de- 
gree. When morality is presented to us in itself as the 
object of our moral affections, we can not help entirely 
loving it ; but when it is presented to us as a formal law, 
we can not help a little hating it ; and we are pleased 
when we are able to rebel against its letter, with the 
spirit, or some semblance of it, on our side — a feeling 
which is the real talisman of all that school of sentiment- 
al literature of which Byron is the chief In the second 
place, we must set aside Wallenstein's reserve and lone- 
liness, qualities which please us partly because they ex- 
cite our curiosity and stimulate our social affections by a 



144 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

sort of half-denial ; partly also because, from experience, 
they raise in us an expectation of real moral excellences, 
strength of mind, and that capacity for warm affection 
which often lurks in the most reserved characters, while 
it is wanting in the least reserved. We must set aside 
again mere intellectual power, which is never the object 
of moral admiration except as the instrument, actual or 
presumptive, of moral virtue. The darker parts of Wal- 
lenstein's character, his violence and unscrupulousness, 
are set aside without question : no one can worship them 
but the wicked or the delirious. There remains the maj- 
esty of his character, crowned by his proud and silent 
death. ISTow this majesty was produced by sacrificing 
the lower and meaner appetites and passions — above all, 
the passion of fear, to a moral ideal, which, such as it 
was, Wallenstein struggled to attain. The ideal was to 
a great extent a false one, and deeply tainted by the ab- 
sence of religious sentiment to which a great man placed 
in the midst of bigots and Jesuits was naturally reduced. 
But it was an ideal ; and the pursuit of an ideal, though 
it be that of a Cynic, is essentially the pursuit of an un- 
selfish object; it is an endeavor to elevate humanity at 
the expense of the selfish appetites of the individual 
man. The end of such endeavors is a common good. It 
is an addition to the high examples and the nobleness of 
the world. Nor is the reward any thing but the affec- 
tion of man, which proud, high characters only seek more 
deeply when they seem perhaps, even to themselves, to 
scorn and repel it. The case may be put in other, prob- 
ably in more exact and truer terms, but I do not think 
it can be put so as to make it any thing but a case of 



THE DOCTEINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 145 

self-denial and self-sacrifice ; and if it be a case of self- 
denial and self-sacrifice, it belongs to tlie Christian type. 
To the same type unquestionably belongs that resigna- 
tion in death which so deeply moves our hearts as a vic- 
tory over our great common enemy, and which completes 
the historical figure of Wallenstein. His acts of mercy, 
his protests against cruel persecution, the traits of his 
conjugal affection, need no reconciling explanation to 
bring them within the Christian pale. 

History will trace a moral connection, where it really 
exists, through all intellectual divisions and under all 
eclipses of intellectual faith. In her eyes Christendom 
remains morally one, though divided ecclesiastically by a 
thousand accidents, by a thousand infirmities, by a thou- 
sand faults. 

It is said that Yoltaire and Eousseau were great con- 
tributors to human progress, and that they were not 
Christians, but enemies to Christianity and outcasts from 
the Christian pale. I admit that Yoltaire and Eousseau, 
in spite of the fearful mischief which every rational man 
must admit them to have done, were contributors to hu- 
man progress, but I deny that, so far as they were con- 
tributors to human progress, they were enemies to Chris- 
tianity or outcasts from the Christian pale. Voltaire 
contributed to human progress in spite of his unchris- 
tian levity, mockery, vanity, and obscenity, by preaching 
Christian beneficence. Christian toleration, Christian hu- 
manity, Christian hatred of Pharisaical oppression. Eous- 
seau contributed to human progress in spite of his un- 
christian impurity, and the egotistical madness from 
which practical Christianity would have saved him by 



146 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

preaching Christian brotherhood and Christian simplicity 
of life. Rousseau's writings are full of the Gospel. His 
theory of the world is couched in distinctly Gospel lan- 
guage, and put into the mouth of a Christian minister. 
Yoltaire railed against what he imagined was Christian- 
ity, but you see in a moment it was not the real Chris- 
tianity ; it was the Christianity of the false, corrupt, and 
persecuting State Church of France, the Christianity 
which recalled the Edict of ISTantes, which inspired the 
Dragonnades, which, in the absurd name of the religion 
of love, murdered Calas and La Barre. AYhom did Vol- 
taire call the best of men ? Of whom did he say, with 
an earnestness to which his nature was almost a stranger, 
that he loved them, and that, if he could, he would pass 
the rest of his life among them in a distant land ? It 
was not the philosophers of Paris or Berlin of whom he 
spoke thus, but the Quakers, with whose sect, then in its 
happiest hour, he had come into contact during his resi- 
dence in England, and whose benevolence, tolerance, and 
gentle virtues he recognizes as identical at once with 
those of the Primitive Christians and with his own. 

The French Revolution again, with all its crimes and 
follies, must, up to a certain point in its course, be accept- 
ed as a step, though a sinister and equivocal step, in the 
progress of mankind. But we have brought all that was 
good in the French Revolution — its aspirations after uni- 
versal brotherhood, and a universal reign of liberty and 
justice — into the pale of moral Christianity with Rous- 
seau and Voltaire. From no other source than Christian- 
ity was derived the genuine spirit of self-devotion which, 
it is vain to doubt, sent forth on a crusade for the free- 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 147 

dom and happiness of man the best soldiers of the Eevo- 
lutionarj armies — those of whom. Hoche and Marceau 
were the gentle, brave, and chivalrous types. On the 
other hand, it was not from Christianity, but from a dark 
depravation of Christianity, abhorred by all in whom the 
graces of the Christian character are seen, that the Mon- 
tagnards derived that lust of persecution which repro- 
duced the Inquisition and its butcheries in the Commit- 
tee of Public Safety and the Eeign of Terror. There are 
men, neither mad nor wicked, to whom the enthusiasts 
of the Jacobin Club are still objects of fervent admira- 
tion. Such a feeling is strange, but not unaccountable. 
The account of it is to be found in the faint tradition 
of Christian fraternity which passed from the Gospel 
through Eousseau to Eobespierre and St. Just, and which 
has redeemed even these sinister names from the utter 
execration of history. Deep as was the abyss of crime 
into which those fanatics fell, there was a deeper abyss 
beyond. All influence of Christianity was indeed gone 
when the lives of millions and the hopes of a world were 
sacrificed, not to any political or social visions, however 
chimerical, but to the utterly selfish and utterly atheistic 
ambition of ISTapoleon. The worship of that conqueror 
by the nation which gave the blood of its children to his 
evil deity for the sake of sharing his domination was, un- 
der the forms of a civilized age, the worship of Moloch 
and the worship of Csesar, the old antagonists of Jehovah 
and of Christ. Comte is at least an impartial witness in 
this matter; and Comte sees progress in Jacobinism, 
where Christianity was still faintly present, while he 
most justly pronounces the domination of Napoleon to 
have been utterly retrograde. 



148 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

Does Christianity, then, interfere with progress of any- 
particular kind, intellectual or industrial ? 

Does it interfere with the progress of science ? As a 
matter of fact, science has not only been advanced, but 
for the most part created by Christians. A bigoted or 
cowardly theology has indeed created some confusion in 
the relations between science and religion, by attempting 
to dominate beyond its proper sphere; but the highest 
scientific minds have found no difiiculty in keeping their 
own course clear, and preserving religious and moral 
Christianity, in spite of any imperfections in the scientific 
ideas of its teachers caused by their having lived in an 
unscientific age. That religious persecution has fearful- 
ly interfered with science, and every other kind of intel- 
lectual progress, both by its direct and its indirect effects, 
may be easily granted. But the tendency to persecution 
has historically been limited to countries in which cer- 
tain vicious relations existed between religion and polit- 
ical power. If it has been found beyond these limits, it 
was as a lingering habit and in an expiring state. 

Is it the Christian conception of God that is likely to 
conflict with the progress of science or of moral philoso- 
phy ? We see at once that Polytheism, subjecting the 
different parts of nature to the sway of different powers, 
conflicts with the unity of creation which the progress 
of science displays. Let it be shown that Christian Mon- 
otheism does the same. There is indeed — and it is a 
momentous fact in historical philosophy — what Hume 
calls a Natural History of Eeligion. All nations have 
been endowed with the same germ or religious senti- 
ment, but they have made to themselves different images 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 149 

of Grod, according to the peculiar aspects of nature with 
which they were brought into contact, and the state of 
their own civilization. The tendency is not yet extinct. 
Narrow-minded men of science, accustomed to only one 
sphere of thought, still create for themselves what they 
think a grander Deity in their own image, rob the Divine 
Nature of its moral part, and set up a Scientific God. If 
the Christian conception of the Deity were tainted by 
one of these historical accidents, even in the slightest de- 
gree, the time would come, in the course of human in- 
quiry, when history would acknowledge the grandeur of 
such a conception, record its temporary beneficence, and 
number it with the past. But it is tainted with no his- 
torical accident whatever. It is Pure Paternity. What 
discoveries respecting man or the world, what progress 
of science or philosophy, can be imagined with which the 
simple conception of God as the Father of All could pos- 
sibly conflict ? 

It is true that Christianity has something of a mys- 
terious character. But that, on this account, it must in- 
terfere with intellectual freedom, or any thing for which 
intellectual freedom is requisite, can hardly be said, when 
Hume himself emphatically speaks of the world as a mys- 
tery, and when the acutest writers of the same school at 
the present day find it necessary to gratify a true intel- 
lectual instinct by reminding us that, after all, beyond that 
which science makes known to us there lies the mysteri- 
ous Unknown."^ 

The moral source and support of great scientific in- 
quiries, as of other great undertakings for the good of 

* See Mr. Herbert Spencer's work on "First Principles," p. 223. 



150 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

mankind, is self-devotion, and self-devotion is the Chris- 
tian virtue. 

Does Christianity interfere with political progress? 
The great instrument of political progress is generally 
allowed to be liberty. It is allowed to be so ultimately 
even by those who wish to suppress it provisionally, and 
to inaugurate for the present a despotic dictatorship of 
their own ideas. And Christianity, by first proclaiming 
the equality and brotherhood of men, became the parent 
of just and enduring liberty. What spiritual power pre- 
sided over the birth of our free institutions ? Was it not 
the earnest though narrow and distorted Christianity of 
tha Middle Ages, which still, though its hour is past, shows 
its ancient spirit in Montalembert ? What power was it 
that directly consecrated the principle of local self-govern- 
ment, the foundation of all true liberty, in the religious 
association of the parish ? Cast your eyes over the map 
of nations, and see whether sincere Christianity and polit- 
ical freedom are unsuited to dwell together. Name, if 
you can, any great Christian philosopher who has been 
an enemy to freedom. On the other hand, Hobbes, Bo- 
lingbroke, Hume, Gibbon, were Imperialists ; they all be- 
longed, though in different degrees, to the school which 
takes a sensual and animal view of man, mistrusts all 
moral and spiritual restraints, and desires a strong des- 
potism to preserve tranquillity, refinement, and the enjoy- 
ments and conveniences of life. It need not be added 
that the most fanatical enemies of Christianity at the pres- 
ent day are also fanatical Imperialists. We have almost 
a decisive instance of the two opposite tendencies in the 
case of Kousseau and Yoltaire. Kousseau had far more 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 151 

of the Gospel in his philosophy than Yoltaire ; and while 
the political Utopia of Yoltaire inclined on the whole to 
Imperialism, being, in fact, a visionary China, and his sym- 
pathies were with those whom he imagined to be the be- 
neficent despots of his age, the political Utopia of Eous- 
seau inclined to an exaggeration of liberty, being a vis- 
ionary State of Nature, and his sympathies were entirely 
with the people. What are the elements external to 
itself which Christianity has found most cognate, and of 
which it has taken up most into its own system? They 
are the two free nations of antiquity — nations whose free- 
dom indeed was a narrow, and therefore a short-lived one, 
compared with that of Christendom, but whose thoughts 
and works were those of the free. The game of freedom 
is a bold game ; those who play it, unlike the Imperialist, 
must be prepared to face present turbulence, extravagance, 
and waywardness, and much besides that is disappointing 
and repulsive, for the sake of results which are often dis- 
tant ; while the Imperialist proposes, by a beneficent dic- 
tatorship, to keep all calm and rational for at least one 
life. And this bold game Christianity, by the force of 
her spiritual elevation, and of her cardinal virtue of hope, 
has always shown herself able and ready to play. By 
mere force of spiritual elevation, with no philosophic 
chart of the future to guide and assure her, she turned 
with a victorious steadiness of conviction, such as science 
itself could scarcely have imparted, from the dying civili- 
zation of Eome to the fierce, coarse, destroying barbarism 
out of which, through her training, was to spring a higher 
civilization, a gentler as well as a better world. If Chris- 
tianity has ever seemed to be the ally of despotism, it was 



152 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

because she was herself corrupted and disguised either 
by delirious asceticism, confounding self-degradation with 
humility, or by ecclesiastical Jesuitism intriguing with po- 
litical power. The second of these agencies has indeed 
been at work on a great and terrible scale — on such a 
scale that those who saw no other form of Christianity 
around them may well be pardoned for having taken 
Christianity to be an enemy of liberty as well as of the 
truth. But the facts of history point the other way. The 
seriousness of Christianity and its deep sense of individual 
responsibility opposed themselves, though in a stern and 
harsh form, to Stuart despotism, with its Buckingham, its 
''Book of Sports," and its disregard of morality and truth. 
The spiritual energy and hopefulness of Christianity op- 
posed themselves to the old Imperialism of Hobbes and 
the Sensualists, who would have sacrificed the hopes of 
humanity to material convenience. The charity and hu- 
mility of Christianity oppose themselves to the new Im- 
perialism, which we are told is to inaugurate a fresh era 
of civilization, and which is, in fact, an insane reverie of 
rampant egotism, dreaming of itself as clothed with abso- 
lute power to force its own theories on the world. 

Does political progress depend on theory ? Why should 
they study that theory less earnestly, with a mind less free 
from the disturbance of interest and ambition, or in any 
way less successfully, whose actuating principle is the love 
of their neighbor, while they are raised by their spiritual 
life above the selfish motives which are the great obsta- 
cles to the attainment and reception of political truth ? 
Does political progress depend upon action ? Political 
action requires a fixed aim, a cool head, and a firm hand. 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 153 

And why should not these be found for the future, as 
throughout past history they have been found, in states- 
men whose objects are disinterested, and whose treasure 
is not here ? Desperate anxiety for the issue is not nec- 
essary, or even conducive to success. A man might play 
a match at chess more eagerly, but he would not play it 
better, if his life were staked on the game. It was not 
supposed that Tell's aim would be steadier when the ap- 
ple was placed on the head of his child. 

We have been told that Christianity almost stifled the 
political genius of Cromwell. "Almost" is a saving 
word. The greatest statesman, perhaps, that the world 
ever saw, and the one who most largely contributed to 
the greatness of his country, even in the most vulgar and 
material sense, not only was a Christian, but drew from 
Christianity, though tainted in his case with Judaism, 
every principle, every idea, every expression of his pub- 
lic life. 

If it is philanthropic enterprise that is to regenerate 
society, with this, again, Christianity has, to say the least, 
no inherent tendency to interfere. I ventured to chal- 
lenge the Positivists, who condemn the Christian view of 
the world for giving the negro race no part in the histor- 
ical development of humanity, to show what part in the 
historical development of humanity these races had real- 
ly played. It is Christianity alone, I submit, which as- 
signs them a place in history, by making them the sub- 
jects of those great missionary and philanthropic enter- 
prises which form so important a part of the life of Chris- 
tendom. As the subjects of such enterprises, they do 
indeed contribute to the development of humanity by 

e2 



154 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

developing tlie religious sympathies and affections. Pos- 
itive Science requires that these races, like the rest, 
should pass, by a spontaneous movement, from Fetich- 
ism into Polytheism, and so, through Monotheism, into 
Atheism, with the corresponding series of social and 
political phases. Christianitj^, disregarding Positive Sci- 
ence, sets to work to turn them into civilized Christians. 

An eminent writer, before mentioned, thinks he has 
contravened Christianity in saying that now, having 
ceased to be a Christian, he loves with a deliberate love 
the world and the things of the world. So he did when, 
being a Christian, he went as a missionary to the East. 
To love the world, it is not necessary to think there is 
no evil in the world. On the contrary, it is the strong 
sense of the evil existing in the world that, by exciting 
the desire to remove it, has led to all the noble enter- 
prises of history. ISTeither need the conviction, however 
deep, that the world is transitory, diminish the desire to 
labor for its good, if the good done is to be not transito- 
ry, but eternal. We are told that the social activity of 
Christians must be paralyzed by the views which are 
alleged to be a part of Christianity respecting the con- 
stant imminence of the Last Day. Why, then, is not all 
social activity paralyzed by the constant imminence of 
death ? 

Again, it is insinuated that the progress of enlightened 
views respecting the duties of nations toward each other 
must be retarded by the dark lust of conquest which is 
inspired by the popular religion, with its gloomy worship 
of the God of Battles. I am unable to discern any his- 
torical foundation for this notion. Christianity is not 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 155 

committed to the conduct of tlie State Priests who sang 
Te Deums for the successfal rapine of Louis XIV. — a 
rapine which, it may be remarked by the way, was at 
least equaled when the last restraints of religion had 
been removed by the Atheist emperor who afterward sat 
on the same throne; neither is Christianity committed 
to the excesses of fanatical sectaries who took the Old 
Testament for their Gospel instead of the New. The 
uncritical Puritan could not so clearly see what we by 
the light of historical criticism most clearly see, that the 
Jews were not a miracle, but a nation ; and that, like all 
other nations, they had their primitive epoch of conquest 
and of narrow nationality, with moral views correspond- 
ingly narrow ; though the whole of this natural history 
of the Jewish race was instinct with, and, as it were, 
transmuted by, a moral and religious spirit, to which it 
is idle to say a parallel can be found in the history of 
any other nation. The character of David, for example, 
by its beauty, its chivalry, and its childlike and passion- 
ate devotion, has sunk deep into the affections of human- 
ity, and justified the sentence that he was a man after 
God's own heart ; but he could not be expected, any 
more than a prince of any other primitive nation, to an- 
ticipate modern enlightenment and humanity by observ- 
ing the laws of civilized war, and giving quarter to the 
garrison and inhabitants of a conquered town. 

This error of the Puritans, however, after all, has not 
left so very deep a stain on history. They were not so 
very ignorant of the real relations between the Old Tes- 
tament and the New. The notion of their having re- 
garded their enemies as Canaanites, and smitten them 



156 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

hip and thigh, is mainly due to the imagination of loose 
historical writers. No civil war in history had ever been 
conducted with half so much humanity or with half so 
much self-restraint as that which they conducted in the 
spirit of their mixed Hebrew and Christian religion. 
Fanciful or cynical writers may picture Cromwell as feel- 
ing a stern satisfaction at the carnage of Drogheda and 
Wexford ; but Cromwell's own dispatches excuse it on 
the ground that it would save more blood in the end. 
You have only to turn to the civil war of the French 
Eevolution — carried on, as it was, in the meridian light 
of modern civilization, and with an entire freedom from 
superstitious influences — to know that even the stern 
spirit of the Old Testament has not been the most cruel 
power in history. There has been, in truth, a good deal 
of exaggeration, and even some cant upon this subject. 
Men who weep over the blood which was shed by Jew- 
ish hands in the name of morality are not indisposed, if 
we may judge by their historical sympathies, to take 
pretty strong measures for an idea. They can embrace, 
with something like rapture, the butcherly vagrancy 
laws of a Tudor King, his brutal uxoricides, his persecu- 
tions, his judicial murders perpetrated on blameless and 
illustrious men, because he belongs to a class of violent 
and unscrupulous characters in history whom their school 
are pleased to style heroes. I see that, according to a 
kindred school of philosophers, Titus performed an un- 
avoidable duty in exterminating the Jews for rebelling 
against the idea of Imperialism, which they could scarce- 
ly, without a miracle, be expected to apprehend. Caesar 
is becoming an object of adoration evidently as a sup- 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 157 

posed type of certain great qualities in which the Chris- 
tian type is supposed to be wanting. He stands as one 
of the great historical Saints of the Comtist Calendar, a 
month being called after his name. Yet this beneficent 
demigod put to the sword a million of Gauls, and sold 
another million into slavery, partly in the spirit of Eo- 
man conquest, but principally to create for himself a mil- 
itary reputation. 

Then it is intimated that the political economy of 
Christianity is bad, and that it has interfered with the 
enjoyment, and therefore with the production of wealth. 
There can be no doubt that Christianity, so far as it has 
had an influence in history, has always tended to the em- 
ployment of productive rather than of unproductive la- 
bor, and to the promotion of art rather than of luxury. 
But these are not yet alleged to be economical evils. 
Wealth has been just as much enjoyed, and the produc- 
tion of wealth just as much stimulated, by the building 
of splendid churches, by the employment of great artists, 
and by a munificent expenditure for the common bene- 
fit, as by the indulgence of personal luxury and pride. 
It is in Christian states, in states really Christian, that 
Commerce has appeared in its most energetic and pros- 
perous, as well as in its noblest form ; the greatest mari- 
time discoveries have been made under the banner of 
the Cross ; and he who says that the life of Gresham or 
Columbus was alien to Christianity, says what is histor- 
ically absurd. Capital and credit are the life of com- 
mercial enterprise. The Gospel inculcates the self-denial 
which is necessary to the accumulation of capital ; and, 
to say the least, it does not discourage the honesty which 



158 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

is the foundation of credit. Honest labor and activity 
in business will hardly be said to be condemned by St. 
Paul ; and if the anxious and covetous overstraining of 
labor is opposed to Christianity, it is equally opposed to 
economical wisdom. Of course the first authors of Chris 
tianity did not teach political economy before its hour, 
They took these, like the other political and social ar 
rangements of the world, as they found them, and re 
lieved poverty in the way in which it was then relieved 
The science of Political Economy, since it left the hands 
of its great founder, has fallen to a great extent into the 
hands of men of less comprehensive minds, under whose 
treatment it has gone near to erecting hardness of heart 
into a social virtue. No doubt there would speedily be 
a divorce between Christianity and the progress of such 
a science as this. But this is not the science of Adam 
Smith. Adam Smith understood the value, moral as 
well as material, of property, but he also understood the 
relative value of property and affection. 

If the community of goods among the early Christians 
is cited as a proof that Christianity must be opposed to 
economical progress, the answer is, that Christianity has 
never erected, or tended to erect, this natural expression 
of new-born love and zeal into a normal condition of so- 
ciety. Whenever a great religious movement has taken 
place in history, the spirit of humanity has beaten in this 
way against its earthly bars, and struggled to realize at 
once that which can not be realized within any calcula- 
ble time, if it is destined ever to be realized here. Chris- 
tian philosophers have pronounced the judgment of ra- 
tional Christianity on Socialism in no ambiguous terms. 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 159 

Yet surely puolitical economists are too well satisfied with 
their science if they feel confident that its laws, or sup- 
posed laws, have yet been harmonized with a sound so- 
cial morality, and with the rational aspirations of social 
man. Surely they must see farther into the future course 
of history than any one else can see, if they are able to 
assure us that the social motives to industry can never 
prevail over the personal motives, or even that the ar- 
rangements in which all reasonable men at present ac- 
quiesce are certainly nearer than those of primitive Chris- 
tianity to the ultimate social ideal. 

The Christian character has of course been treated of 
here in its moral and social aspect alone, because in that 
character alone it is manifested in history, and brought 
into direct relations with historical progress. But it is 
inconceivable that the Love of God should ever conflict 
with the Love of our Neighbor. It is inconceivable that 
the one should ever fail to be supported and intensified 
by the other. The Comtists may preserve their love of 
Humanity in all its fervor ; they will find it equally fer- 
vent in those who add to it the love of God. 

It has been objected that Christianity, from the mere 
fact of its being an historical religion, opposes progress 
by compelling the world always to look backward. I 
scarcely apprehend the force of this objection, though 
those who make it evidently feel it to be of great force. 
If a type of character was to be set up for the imitation 
of mankind, it was necessary that it should be set up at 
some point in history, and that the eye of humanity 
should always be turned to that point, wherever it might 
be. But the fixity of the point in history at which the 



160 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

guiding light was revealed no more interferes with his- 
torical progress than the fixity of the pole-star interferes 
with the progress of a ship. 

There is, indeed, another objection, of a much graver 
kind, to the sufficiency of a merely historical religion. 
Historical evidence, being the evidence of witnesses who 
are dead, and who may possibly, however improbably, 
have been mistaken, can not rise beyond a high proba- 
bility. It can not amount to such absolute certainty as 
we derive from the evidence of our senses, or from that 
of our moral perceptions. And probability, however 
high, though a sufiicient ground for our practical de- 
cisions, is not a sufiicient ground for our religious faith 
and feelings. Butler has imported the rules of worldly 
prudence into a sphere where they have no place. We 
may wisely stake our worldly interests on a probable, or 
even, if the prize be great, on a merely possible event, 
but we can not worship and commune with a Being on a 
probability even of ten thousand to one that he is God. 

But here again history, taking a broad view of the 
facts, finds a sufQ.cient answer to the question whether 
Christendom is likely to perish under mere historical ob- 
jections. In all that has really created and sustained 
Christendom there is nothing which rests on historical 
evidence alone. That which has created and sustained 
Christendom has been the Christian idea of God as the 
Father of all, the spiritual life supported by that idea, the 
Character of Christ always present as the object of Chris- 
tian affection and the model for Christian imitation, and 
the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul. 
The fact of the Kesurrection itself, like the immortality 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 161 

of the soul of which it is the pledge, rests on other than 
mere historical evidence. It rests in part on the doctrine, 
cognizable by reason, independently of historical evidence, 
that, from the intimate connection between death and sin, 
a perfectly sinless nature, such as that of Him who over- 
came the grave, could not be holden of death.* 

Has no great crisis, then, arrived in the history of 
Christendom ? Certainly a great crisis has arrived, and 
one which bids fair soon to merge small doubts and diffi- 
culties in mighty events. But it is not so clear that this 
crisis is an unhappy one. We may be sure it is one 
which has been long in preparation. Of the great events 
of history it may be said with more truth, or at least with 
more practical import, than it was said by Montaigne of 
death, " Every day they approach, the last day they ar- 
rive." We may be sure also that what is coming will be 
what the world has deserved ; and the world has of late 
been a scene of religious, moral, political, and intellectual 
effort, often perhaps misguided and often equivocal, but 
still effort, which has at least deserved a different meed 
from that due to lethargy and despair. Finally, we may 
be sure that good will assert that indestructible quality 
which history recognizes in it, and pass from the old state 
of things entire in substance, though perhaps changed in 
form, into the new. 

* It is commonly assumed that the theory respecting the formation of 
character by habit, the laws of which are analogous to the laws of matter, 
is equally applicable to the formation of vice and to the formation of vir- 
tue. But is not virtue rather a gradual emancipation of the reason and 
conscience, the sovereign powers of the soul, from every thing in the shape 
of motive that can affect them in a mechanical manner, and enslave them 
to the laws of matter, and to the material accident, death ? 



162 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES OF 

The members of the divided cliurclies have prayed for 
their reunion through the conversion of all to the peculiar 
doctrines of one. It seems as though the prayer were 
now about to be granted in a less miraculous manner by 
the simple removal, through concurrent moral and po- 
litical causes, of the grand cause of division in Christen- 
dom. If historical symptoms are to be trusted, the long 
death-agony of three centuries is about to terminate, and 
within no very long period the Papacy will cease to ex- 
ist. The chief historical conditions of its existence have 
expired, or are rapidly expiring. In the supremacy of 
human authority over reason in the mind of man the 
power of Eome had its origin and being, and the suprem- 
acy of reason over human authority in the mind of man 
is now decisive and complete. The rationalistic theories 
of recent advocates of the Papacy, such as De Maistre and 
Dr. Newman, are suicidal concessions to the spirit of a 
changed world. The loss of moral allegiance, even in 
countries nominally Papal, has for some time past been 
continuous and rapid, and we ourselves well know the 
source whence the small, precarious, and equivocal acces- 
sions of strength have been derived. The great revolt of 
the Keformation was arrested in its progress over Europe 
partly by accidents of national temperament and com- 
parative mental cultivation, partly and principally by the 
persecuting power of the great Catholic monarchies, which 
conspired to preserve the Papacy as the keystone of des- 
potism, and, by balancing each other, gave it a factitious 
independence, of which the suspension of Italian nation- 
ality was also a necessary condition. The Catholic mon- 
archies are dead or dying. A Voltairian dynasty, the 



THE DOCTRINE OF HISTORICAL PROGRESS. 163 

offspring of the French Eevokition, sits on the throne of 
Charles IX. The successors of Phihp II. have suppressed 
monasteries and allied themselves with the liberal house 
of Orleans. The heir of Ferdinand 11. has been compell- 
ed to recognize Protestantism and to grant a Constitution 
to the Austrian Empire. The balance of power between 
France, Spain, and Austria having been destroyed, the 
nominal head of Christendom has sunk to a puppet of 
French diplomacy, degraded to the dust by the sinister 
and contemptuous support which prolongs the existence 
of his mutilated power. The revival of Italian nation- 
ality seems now to be assured. It is vain to think that 
the Primate of an Italian kingdom can be the Father of 
Christendom. It is equally vain to think that the na- 
tional government of Italy can suffer an independent po- 
tentate, elected by a European conclave, to exist at its 
side. It is vain to talk of dividing the temporal from the 
spiritual power. To command the soul is to command 
the man. It was for the Suzerainty of Europe, and for 
nothing less, that the Papacy and the Germanic Empire 
fought, the one with the arms of force, the other with the 
arms of superstition. We might share the dream of a 
purely spiritual Papacy if we did not know too well that 
the Papal power, to whatever extent it may have been 
exercised for spiritual ends, was the creature of political 
accidents and political influences, aided by the instru- 
ments, not spiritual, though not strictly material, of relig- 
ious intimidation and intrigue. The Papacy will perish, 
and in it will perish the great obstacle to the reconcilia- 
tion and reunion of Christendom. Nor will it perish 
alone. It will draw down with it in its fall, sooner or 



164 ON SOME SUPPOSED CONSEQUENCES, ETC. 

later, all those causes of division wliich have subsisted 
by mere antagonism to it, and many which it has kept 
alive by its direct, though unrecognized influence over 
the rest of the ecclesiastical world. Then, if Christianity 
be true, there may, so far as the outward arrangements of 
the world are concerned, once more arise a Christendom, 
stripped indeed of much that is essential to religion in 
the eyes of polemical theologians, but as united, grand, 
and powerful, as capable of pervading with its spirit the 
whole frame of society, as fruitful of religious art and all 
other manifestations of religious life, as Christendom was 
before the great schism, but resting on the adamantine 
basis of free conviction, instead of the sandy foundation 
of human authority and tradition supported by political 
power. Those who imagine that such a consummation, 
if it come, must come with terrible convulsions and dis- 
tress, do not consider that a great part of educated Europe 
has, in fact, for some time been united, and guided in the 
conduct of life, and in all international and general rela- 
tions, by a common Christianity. The world, as usual, 
has anticipated the results of speculation by tacitly solv- 
ing a great practical problem for itself; and it has found 
that the brightness of the sunbeam resides in the sun- 
beam, not in the motes, and that the crystal floor of 
Heaven is not as unstable as water because it is as clear. 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 



A Letter to the ''Daily JVeios'^ of November 20, 1861, de- 
f ending the principles maintained in the foregoing Lec- 
tures against the criticisms of an article in the ''West- 
minster Remem''' of October in the same year^ entitled 
''Mr. Goldwin Smith on the Study of History ^ 



TO THE EDITOR OF THE " DAILY NEWS." 

Sir, — You were so good as to allow me the other day to 
use your columns for the purpose of defending my conduct 
as a professor against the " Westminster Review."* I will 
now ask your permission to use them for the more agreea- 
ble purpose of saying a few words on the question between 
the view of history and humanity advocated in my Lec- 
tures, and those advocated by the Reviewer. I do not con- 
cur in the assumption that the daily press is not a fit organ 
for such discussions. The daily press has long since been 
practically accepted by the community as a fit organ for the 
discussion of every thing that concerns and interests man ; 
and it has this great advantage, that every one who writes 
in it must at least try to make himself intelligible, a disci- 
pline which many writers of great books would be all the 
better for having undergone. The notion that calmness, 
gravity, and moderation in the treatment of great subjects 

* The letter here alluded to, as it related merely to my personal con- 
dnct and character, is not reprinted. 



166 THE MORAL FEEEDOM OF MAN. 

are confined to quarterly journals, is not, I venture to think, 
agreeable to experience. 

So far as I may have occasion to allude to the " Westmin- 
ster Review," I shall treat it, of course, merely as the expo- 
nent of certain opinions, of which it is the organ, not as a 
criticism of my own work. 

No part of the philosoj^hy of history is more important 
than that which teaches us to study the history of opinion, 
and to separate, in each theory of man and of the world, 
that which demands our consideration as the result of pure 
thought from that which may be set aside as the mere ex- 
pression of feeling produced by the circumstances of the 
time. 

Thrice, at least, since man became conscious, or partly 
conscious, of his spiritual nature, and of the dignity of his 
being, a sort of despondency, the result in paiit of political 
disaster, has come over the moral world. Such a despond- 
ency followed on the fall of that narrow but vigorous polit- 
ical life, compounded of patriotism and stoicism, which was 
embodied in the Roman republic. It followed on the tre- 
mendous religious wars and revolutions of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. It has followed on the terrible, and, 
to a great extent, fruitless revolutionary struggles through 
which Europe has just passed. The abandonment of those 
social aspirations of man which are so intimately connected 
with his spiritual hojjes gave birth in the first instance to 
Ca3sarism, in the second instance to the absolutism of the 
eighteenth century, which was typified by Louis the Four- 
teenth, and erected into a Chinese Utopia by Voltaire. In 
the present instance it has given birth to Imperialism, which 
has naturally triumphed most signally in the country where 
the decay of religion, as well as the political lassitude arising 
from abortive revolution, is most complete. The loss of re- 



. THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN". 167 

ligious faith has in each of the three instances been attended 
by the prevalence of a materialistic superstition. The Ro- 
man materialist was the slave of astrologers : the last cen- 
tury hung on the lips of Cagliostro and his brother quacks ; 
and we fill the void of spiritual life with mesmerism and 
spirit-rapping. 

At the same time, the religious life of the present age is 
attacked by a powerful influence of a different kind. The 
pressure of false authority, reigning in old dogmatic estab- 
lishments, has kept religion in an irrational state, as any man 
may easily convince himself by comparing the identity of 
the Christian character and life in all communions with the 
differences of their dogmatic creeds, and the vital impor- 
tance attached by each communion to its own. Meantime 
science, having achieved her emancipation from authority, 
has made prodigious progress, and acquired vast influence 
over the life of man. Thus religion in her weakness and 
her fetters is brought into contact and into contrast with 
science in her strength and freedom; and no wonder that 
to exclusively scientific minds the domain of spirit should 
seem the last strong-hold of unreason, which it will be the 
crowning triumph of science to subdue. Great men of sci- 
ence, indeed, like all great men, know the limits of their own 
sphere. But the lesser men of science, who, to tell the plain 
truth, have often no more largeness of mind or breadth of 
cultivation than an ingenious mechanic, grasp eagerly at the 
sceptre of the moral world. 

Comte, the real though disclaimed author of the " West- 
minster" philosophy, was placed in a position which exposed 
him to all these influences in the highest degree. As a 
Frenchman, he lived in the midst of political despair. He 
saw religion only in the aspect of French ultramontanism, 
and had no alternative before him but that of French skep- 



16S THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

ticism, wliich he pardonably preferred. Rational religion 
lie had never beheld. His cultivation had evidently been 
almost exclusively scientific, and his course of Positive Phi- 
losophy is a perfect representation of the tendencies of ex- 
clusively scientific minds when unprovided with a rational 
theory of the moral world and a rational religion. He goes 
through the physical sciences ; arrives at that which is be- 
yond science ; and, impatient of the limit set to his course, 
tries to bridge over the gulf by laying it down, dogmatically 
and without proof, that the moral — or, as he chose to call it, 
the sociological — world diflers from the physical only in the 
greater complexity of its phenomena, and the greater diffi- 
culty, consequent on that complexity, of resolving its phe- 
nomena into their necessary laws. 

There can scarcely be a doubt that Comte, toward the 
end of his life, by which time he had been abandoned by 
Mr. Mill and all his rational disciples, was insane. Xor is it 
difficult to detect the source of his insanity. It was egotism, 
uncontrolled by the thought of a higher power, and, in its 
morbid irritation, unsoothed by the influence of religion. 
The passage in which he says that having at first been only 
an Aristotle, he, through his afiection for a female friend, 
became also a St. Paul, has been often quoted. But it is 
not a more rampant display of egotism than the passage at 
the beginning of his " Catechism," in which he depicts the 
" memorable conclusion" of his course of lectures as the 
opening of a new era, and shows how the great thinkers who 
had preceded him in history were precursors of himself. 

In his later phase, having become a St. Paul, he proceeded 
to found a new religion, which is simply an insane j^arody of 
the Roman Catholicism before his eyes, set a mystic morality 
above science, and turned the " Positive Philosophy" upside 
down. "Every one," says the "Westminster," "who has 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 169 

read any thing of Comte's works, especially the later, knows 
that it is the very foundation of his method to give the i^re- 
dominance to the moral faculties." Those who having, per- 
haps, just read Comte, fancy that they alone have read him, 
will find, on farther reference, that the qualifying words 
" especially the later" arc by no means superfluous. 

All honor to Comte, however, for this — that he Avas not a 
mere reckless assailant of the convictions by which the 
world around him lived. He produced, at the cost, no 
doubt, of much conscientious labor and earnest thought, 
what he believed to be a new faith, and tendered it to man- 
kind as a substitute for that which he took away. That the 
view of humanity which he adopted was ignoble and absurd 
was his misfortune, as the victim of unhappy influences, far 
more than his fault. If it were not so clear that he was de- 
ranged at the time when he invented his new religion, he 
might well be said to have done Christendom a great serv- 
ice by trying, with decisive result, the experiment of satis- 
fying man's rehgious instincts by a creed and church other 
than the Christian. As it is, this momentous task is left 
for the "Westminster," which, indeed, seems to have made 
great progress toward fulfilling it ; for whereas in January 
we were exhorted, with much solemn pathos, to brace up 
our courage to the point of going forth into the void in 
search of a new religion, we are now confidently invited to 
leave Christianity, and " stand with the * Westminster' on 
solid ground." 

In England, Comte has drawn his most distinguished dis- 
ciples from the University of Oxford. When the Univer- 
sity awoke from the long torpor of the last century, a vio- 
lent ecclesiastical movement set in, which naturally took a 
High-Church direction, and, as every one knows, threw 
many of our best and most gifted members into the Church 

^11 



170 THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

of Rome. The recoil after that movement staGrejered most 
of US, and flung some out of rehgion altogether. These 
men fell in several cases sheer down into Comtism, and it 
seems that the University of Land has still a fair chance of 
furnishing leaders to that persuasion. But some of them 
appear to be in an uncertain and transition state, which they 
confidently invite the w^orld to accept as the " solid ground" 
of complete and final truth. At least they vehemently re- 
pudiate " ajiheism," and affect the phrase " spiritjtil." Do 
they mean* by God merely a set .of scien.tjific laws ? Do 
they me^n by^ spirit onlyvaiisubstanice, the' i)h en omen a of 
which are more " complex" than the phenomena of the ma- 
terial world? They proclaim that they are "neither Athe- 
ist, Pantheist, Positivist, nor Materialist." Do they, then, 
believe in the existence of a personal God ? If so, do they 
suppose that only " scientific" relations exist between that 
God and the spirit of man? Have they made up their 
mind about the immortality of the soul ? All these ques- 
tions we have a right to ask them when they invite us to 
leave our present position and " stand" with them " on solid 
ground." 

Generations at Oxford pass quickly. Within the brief 
space of twenty years I have seen the wheel come full cir- 
cle. When I was an undergraduate, theology was "the 
queen (and tyrant) of the sciences." Now it is an " extinct 
science." Then, the questions between the Vulcanian and 
Neptunian theories in geology were being settled by refer- 
ence to the double nature of a sacrament. Now, we are 
settling all the questions of the moral and spiritual world 
by reference to the methods of physical science. In those 
days, scientific experience was set at naught, and we were 
told that though in science the earth might go round the 
sun, in theology the sun went round the earth. Now", mor- 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

al experience is set at naught, and we are told that, morally, 
we may know action to be free, but that science pronounces 
it to be bound by the law of causation. The sneers which 
are at present directed against free-will are the exact coun- 
terpart, and the just retribution, of the sneers which were 
formerly directed against induction. We have tramj^led on 
the lower truth, and we pay the heavy penalty of producing 
enemies to the highest. When science has been fairly ad- 
mitted to its due place in the University, its vengeful usurp- 
ations will probably cease, and we shall no longer, in this 
way at least, bewilder and disturb the world. 

One who knows Oxford can hardly doubt that the vio- 
lence of the reaction among us has partly supplied the spir- 
it which animates the "Westminster Review." Among 
other indications, we may recognize with pleasure a kindly 
feeling toward the University, and a disposition to admit 
that, though benighted in her general character, yet in vir- 
tue of certain secondary influences of a happy kind, such as 
the study of Mill and Grote, she is capable of producing 
great men. We may also perceive, in an element most hos- 
tile to all that is ecclesiastical, some traces of an ecclesias- 
tical training-place, such as an ardent passion for propa- 
gandism, and a tendency to flirt (to use an undignified ex- 
pression) with the half-educated minds of mechanics, analo- 
gous to the ecclesiastical habit of flirting with the intellects 
of half-educated women. Do we not even see, in the ex- 
traordinary rapidity with which the " science" of some of 
these high scientific minds has been acquired, an analogy to 
the religious phenomenon of " sudden conversion ?" 

The special violence of Oxford reaction may perhaps be 
fairly gauged by comparing the "Westminster" with its 
nearest neighbor in philosophy, the " National." Those 
who are farthest from being adherents of the " ISTational" 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

must see that the opinions of its chief writers have been 
formed calmly and deliberately, not under the influence of 
a furious revulsion of feeling. It gives at least a due place 
to science in its view of things ; but it is not science mad ; 
and it treats, at all events, with philosophic tenderness that 
which is at present the life of the world. When I read vio- 
lent and contemptuous invectives against " the popular re- 
ligion," I always suspect that the writer has not long 
emerged from some particularly " popular" phase of that 
religion, and that his language is affected for the moment 
by an angry recollection of the thraldom in which his spirit 
has recently been held. 

If the " Westminster" chooses to call this attempt at in- 
tellectual diagnosis an unconscious contribution to " Sociol- 
ogy," no one will have a right to object, except the few who 
cherish the purity of the EngUsh tongue. I see that I am 
supposed to have unwittingly subscribed to some new view 
of humanity in saying that the fall of the Papacy is " inevi- 
table," and that the age of Louis XIV. " can never return." 
If my diagnosis is right, the influence of extraordinary cir- 
cumstances may fairly be pleaded in palliation of certain 
very violent attacks on Christianity, in case those attacks 
should hereafter prove to have been premature. But the 
palliation wo^ld not extend to ungenerous tactics, such as 
the trick of Jesuitically goading orthodoxy to persecute 
moderate Liberalism, which are a mistake under any dis- 
pensation. Voltaire has never been forgiven for stirring up 
persecution against Rousseau. 

The speculations of Mr. Buckle, again, are evidently dom- 
inated by the influence of a circumstance which is j^urely 
accidental. The reason why he makes religion the demon 
of history clearly is, that he imagines religion to be the 
arch-enemy of his divinity — Science. But the slight ground 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 173 

which there is for this depends on the irrational condition 
in which, as has been before said, rehgion has been kept 
by false authority, embodied in state churches. The free 
churches of the United States have necessarily taken their 
hue in some measure from the churches of Europe, with 
whose bigotry they are somewhat tinged. Yet in the 
United States there seems to be scarcely any complaint that 
free inquiry in any department is stifled or discouraged by 
religion. Even here, a good deal of exaggeration is re- 
quired to make out a serious case of opposition between re- 
ligion and science. When Lord Palmerston snubs the 
Scotch for desiring a day of religious humiliation at the ap- 
proach of the cholera, instead of introducing improved drain- 
age, he is lauded by Mr. Buckle as an Archangel of Light 
rebuking the Powers of Darkness. Would Lord Palmer- 
ston have told the Ironsides, on the eve of a battle, that if 
they meant to gain the victory they must fight and not 
pray ? And, after all, is the Scotch nation so very marked 
an instance of the ill effects of religion in destroying good 
sense and preventing self-exertion ? 

I think I can show Mr. Buckle that Christianity has re- 
cently rendered science a most signal service, not the first it 
has rendered of the kind. He will scarcely deny that the 
ethical doctrine of self-sacrifice is a peculiarly, if not an ex- 
clusively Christian doctrine, and that it Avas Christianity 
that first effectively filled society with this aspiration. 'Now 
he has placed before us, in his last volume, a picture, evi- 
dently not imaginary, but real, of an intellect of first-rate 
power, drawn by natural ambition to the glittering prizes 
of political and oratorical eminence, but, in the spirit of self- 
sacrifice, renouncing those prizes, and devoting itself, for the 
sake of its kind, to the inquiry after scientific truth. I can 
not help thinking that such an instance, vividly present to 



174 THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

his mind, ought to convince him that, contrary to his the- 
ory, moral excellence does contribute, as well as intellectual 
greatness, to the scientific progress of the world. 

If Mr. Buckle has ever had the opportunity of observing 
the influence of rational and healthy religion on the intellect 
and character, he has not thought it worth his while, as a 
philosopher, to record the results of his observation. 

None of us will escape the influences of our time. We 
shall undergo them, more or less, in the way of repulsion if 
not of attraction ; but we may at least try to analyze them 
and guard against them, instead of courting their domina- 
tion, and surrendering ourselves to their sway. 

Such a question as that of the free personality of man, 
which is the real point at issue, is likely to be solved by 
each of us for himself, and by mankind collectively, on prac- 
tical rather than philosophical grounds. Probably no man, 
when engaged in high and inspiring action, ever for a mo- 
ment doubted his moral freedom, or imagined himself to be 
the mere organ of a " sociological" law. And the world is 
now once more entering upon a course of action of a high 
and inspiring kind. The lassitude which followed on the 
convulsion of 1848 is passing away. The emancipation of 
Italy, and the resolute but wise and temperate struggle 
which Hungary is making for her freedom, have revived 
the political hopes of man ; and if there are discouraging 
appearances on the other side of the Atlantic, they are qual- 
ified by the signal proofs of immense national energy and 
great faith in institutions which vast armaments of citizen 
soldiers, by their mere existence, undeniably afibrd. Even 
in France, the land of Comte, Proudhon, and Bonapartism, 
Jules Simon has gone forth the herald of a difierent state 
of things. A greater object of endeavor than any mere po- 
litical emancipation or improvement begins to present itself 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 175 

to our view. The i)olitical supports of the Papacy having 
been cut away by the fall or desperate Aveakness of the old 
Catholic monarchies, on which, since the Reformation, it has 
rested, and the power of the Popes having (with deference 
to M. Guizot be it said) long ceased to be a spiritual power, 
the great pillars of irrational dogma and the chief source of 
schismatical division among the Christian churches are in a 
fair way of being removed ; and the reunion of Christendom, 
which for three centuries has been an empty and hopeless 
prayer, is likely at last to become a practicable aim. Prob- 
ably it would be a greater service to humanity, on philo- 
sophical as well as on religious grounds, to contribute the 
smallest mite toward this consummation, than to construct 
the most perfect demonstration of the free personality of 
man. As things are, rationalistic and fatalistic reveries 
may be laboriously confuted ; but amid the energies and as- 
pirations of a regenerated Christendom they would sponta- 
neously pass away. 

The rational object of discussion in this as in other de- 
partments is to produce practical conviction. N'ames and 
theoretical statements may take care of themselves. The 
"Westminster" says: "Any thing which tends to deny to 
man the fullest power to develop his own faculties, to con- 
trol his own life, and form his future, we are ready to con- 
demn." If it will adhere to this declaration in the natural 
sense of the words, there is nothing more to be said, except 
that if comets " formed their own future" they would be 
rather embarrassing subjects of "science." 

A student and teacher of History, however, is compelled 
to deal with a theory which, if true, would deeply affect the 
treatment of his special subject. 

We are in effect told with great vehemence of language, 
rising, when objections are offered, to a highly objurgatory 



176 THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

key, that the free personality of man is an illusion ; for that, 
feel as free as we may, our actions, both individual and col- 
lective, are determined by a law, or a set of laws, as fixed 
as those which determine the phenomena of physical agents, 
and of which what we call our free-will is only the manifest- 
ation. 

The answer is: This discovery is most momentous, if 
true. Let the law, or set of laws, be stated, and its or their 
existence demonstrated by reference to the facts of human 
life or history, and we will accept them as we accept any 
other hypothesis which is distinctly propounded and satis- 
factorily verified. But at present, not only is there no veri- 
fication, there is not even a hypothesis before us. Comte, in- 
deed, put forward a hypothesis — that of the necessary prog- 
ress of society through the "Theological," "Metaphysical," 
and "Positive" states in succession. But as the "Westmin- 
ster" repudiates the titles of " Positivist" and " Atheist," I 
may assume that it abandons Comte's hypothesis as an ac- 
count of humanity, even if it adheres to it as an account of 
the history of science. Mr. Mill has merely reproduced 
Comte. Mr. Buckle can hardly be said to have put forward 
any general hypothesis, unless it be that morality never pro- 
motes the improvement of the species, and that religion al- 
ways retards it. His theory, again, would necessarily be 
rejected by the " Westminster," if that journal rei^udiates 
" Atheism" in a practical sense. And since it has led him 
to the conclusion that there are no two countries which 
more closely resemble each other in their condition than 
Scotland and Spain, I presume there can not be much ques- 
tion as to its value in the minds of ordinary reasoners. 

Sir Isaac Newton did not go about the world asserting 
that the motions of the planets must have a law, and railing 
at people for doubting his assertion. He j)ropounded the 



THE MOKAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 177 

hypothesis of gravitation, and verified it by reference to the 
facts. We only ask the discoverers of the Law of History 
to do the same. 

In the same way, when philosophers proclaim with angry 
vehemence, and violent expression of contempt for gainsay- 
ers, that there is a better religion than Christianity, we only 
ask them to produce a better religion. 

I have indeed suggested a reason for surmising that the 
verification of a law of History will be rather a difficult mat- 
ter, since. History being but partly unfolded, a portion only 
of the facts are before us. The "Westminster" vehemently 
asserts that " the human race does not increase in bulk : it 
changes in character. In no respect does it remain the 
same. It assumes ever new phases. ^^ The universal postu- 
late of science is that things will continue as they are. But 
here is a science which postulates that the things with 
which it deals will always be changing in every respect, so 
that the truth of to-day may be the exploded chimera of to- 
morrow. Direct verification of a general hypothesis in this 
case seems to be impossible. And as we have no other his- 
tory wherewith to compare that of the inhabitants of this 
planet, verification by comparison is of course out of the 
question. 

In regard to the individual actors of which the sum of 
history is made up, our " instincts," which the " Westmin- 
ster" allows are to be taken into account as well as histor- 
ical induction, tell us plainly that at the moment of action 
all the " antecedents" being as they are, we are free to do 
the action or let it alone. They tell ns, when the action is 
done, that we are free to do it or let it alone. And, in the 
form of moral judgment, they praise or condemn the actions 
of other men on the same supposition. This is not " meta- 
physics," nor is it part of any obsolete controversy about 

H2 



178 THE MOEAL FEEEDOM OF MAN. 

"predestination." It is at least as much a matter of com- 
mon sense, and a ground of daily feelings and conduct, as 
the sensation of heat and cold. Till the sense of moral free- 
dom, conscience, and the instincts which lead us to praise 
and blame, reward and punish the actions of others, are ex- 
plained away, we shall continue to believe that there is 
something in human actions which renders them not mere- 
ly more "complex" than the ^^henomena of the physical 
world, but essentially different in regard to the mode of 
their production. 

I am not aware that any account has yet been given ei- 
ther of our sense of freedom or of conscience, except on the 
hypothesis of free-will. As to praise and blame, it is said 
they attach to actions and qualities simply as they are " mor- 
al." It only remains to define " moral," and see whether 
you can help including in it the notion of freedom. We 
are told that fixed and settled dispositions are praised and 
blamed most, though, from the fact that they are fixed and 
settled, their actions are the least free. But we praise and 
blame such dispositions on the assumption that they were 
freely formed. Nothing can be either more fixed and set- 
tled or more odious than the disposition of a man who has 
been bred up among cannibals and thieves. Yet we blame 
it very little, because it has not been freely formed. 

It may be observed that, in attempting to explain moral 
approbation or disapprobation as attaching, not to free ac- 
tions or freely-formed characters, but to " moral qualities," 
the " Westminster" is simply reproducing the argument by 
which Jonathan Edwards attempted to reconcile moral 
sense with Predestination. Some caution, therefore, should 
be used in sneering at the views of Jonathan Edwards as a 
type of obsolete metaphysics. 

As to the AristoteHan theory of "habit," I should not be 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 179 

afraid to impugn it (if it were necessary) any more than 
the Aristotelian theory that virtue consists in acting " in a 
mean." I am strongly inclined to think that Aristotle, and 
those who have followed him, observed vice and jumped to 
a conclusion about virtue. I have no doubt that in its prog- 
ress toward vice the soul falls under the dominion of quasi- 
material laws, of which it becomes at last the utter slave. 
But I believe, and think it matter of general consciousness, 
that the progress of the soul toward virtue is a progress to- 
ward freedom. 

The theory of human action in which the " Westminster" 
at present reposes is, that "our acts are caused mainly by 
our own characters, which are formed mainly by our own 
efforts." It only remains to give us an account of" effort." 
Is it the same with action, or something different ? If it is 
the same, the theory comes to this — that action is caused by 
character, which is caused by action. If it is different, tell 
us what it is, and bring it into the chain of necessary conse- 
quences on which your science is to be founded. 

"The common sense of mankind seems to have assumed 
that the will possesses an immense power of subduing cir- 
cumstances, forming character, and regulating action." Com- 
pare this with the allegation in the next page but one, that 
"our wills are determined by our characters and our cir- 
cumstances." In the first proposition the " will" is evident- 
ly taken to be the original source of character. In the sec- 
ond the will is determined by the character which it origin- 
ates. 

Look, too, at the following passage, in which the " West- 
minster" attempts to turn upon me an expression I have 
used as to the constant working of the Deity in nature : 
" If He is not working still in nature, he says, we have a 
stransje idea of Providence. Then His will must continue 



180 THE MOEAL FEEEDOM OF MAN. 

to maintain regular laws. If He does, is He, too, absorbed 
into this chain of fate ? Is His will sunk in a physical ne- 
cessity ? N'o, they will tell us. He works regularly, because 
it is His nature to act by law. Then why is it so degrading 
to supi3ose that this is man's nature also?" Does the Re- 
viewer hold that man " maintains the regular laws of human 
nature by his will ?" or is his argument that, since it is not 
degrading to the Deity to be the master of natural laws, it 
is not degrading to man to be their slave ? 

The fact is, we have not before us in the " Westminster" 
any definite theory of human action, of humanity, or of his- 
tory whatever. We have merely a passionate determina- 
tion to assert that there is some scientific law which shall 
oust " the popular religion," and that, even though the law 
can not be found, it ought to be, and must be there. 

A torrent of ridicule is poured upon me for having sup- 
posed that any inferences afiecting the freedom of human 
action have ever been drawn, or that there has been a tend- 
ency to draw any, from the alleged uniformity of " moral 
statistics." There are various ways of receding from an 
untenable position ; and that of contemptuously denying 
that it was ever taken np, if not the most gracious or ingen- 
uous, is perhaps the most satisfactory and decisive. The 
same may be said of the contemptuous denial that there 
has been any disposition to applaud j^hysical theories which 
break down the barrier between humanity and brutes. 

It would be a very wicked as well as a very silly thing to 
oppose such a benefit to mankind as the formation of a new 
science. If the Reviewer thinks he can found a science on 
*' high probability running not seldom into moral certainty" 
— the estimate of the foundation of his new science which 
he appears willing to adopt — let him do so by all means, 
and we will repose under the beneficent shadow of the sci- 



THE MOEAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 181 

ence which he founds. I have no fear lest man should be 
"degraded" by the reception of any kind of truth. On the 
other hand, I have not much fear lest I should "undermine 
all natural religion" by maintaining that free personality in 
and through which alone men can apprehend or commune 
with a personal God. 

Of course there is no direct opposition between scientific 
prevision and the freedom of human action. The opposition 
is between the freedom of human action and the necessary 
causation on which scientific prevision is founded. . As to 
the Divine prevision, which is so freely used as an argument- 
iim ad homineyn against the advocates of free-will, it would 
conflict with the freedom of human action if it were found- 
ed, like scientific prevision, on necessary causation. But we 
have not the slightest reason to believe that this is the case. 
We can not form the slightest idea as to the mode of the 
Divine prevision, and till we can it will be a mere sophism 
to bring it into this question. 

Christendom has been compelled by its moral instincts to 
reject the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination ; and though 
that doctrine may put on the name of "Providence" or 
" scientific prevision," we shall be compelled by the same in- 
stincts to reject it still. 

Transfer to the subject of physical science the admissions 
which the discoverers of this new science of humanity are 
compelled to make touching their subject, and let us see 
what the consequence to physical science would be. Sup- 
pose physical agents endowed with a " will," that will pos- 
sessing "immense power of subduing their circumstances," 
" forming their character, and regulating their actions ;" sup- 
pose that their operations were caused by their " characters," 
and that their characters " were caused mainly by their own 
efforts ;" that they had the fullest power " to develop their 



182 THE MOEAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

own faculties" and to " form their own future" — w^hat sort 
of ground would physical science then rest on ? With how 
much confidence would her inductions and predictions be 
made? 

So far as human actions are determined, not by the self- 
formed character and the individual will, but by our circum- 
stances, including the general constitution of our nature, so 
far they are of course the subjects actually, or potentially, of 
science ; and on this ground the sciences of ethics, politics, 
and political economy are formed. It is not, I believe, in 
any thing tha-t I have w^'itten that you will find a low esti- 
mate of the benefits wdaich an improved treatment of those 
sciences is likely to confer on mankind. 

It is not philosophic to class under the head of circum- 
stance the influence w^hich the social actions of men have on 
the lives and characters of their fellows. That the life and 
character of each of us is immensely influenced by society, 
so much so as to confine the free- wall and the responsibility 
of each within narrow limits, is a thought not imwelcome, 
but, on the contrary, most welcome to the weakness of hu- 
manity. Yet each of us knows that there is something 
which depends, not on the society in which he is placed, but 
on himself alone. 

Every man, looking back over his own past life, feels that 
he has been in a great degree the creature of circumstance, 
and of social influences. He can also, so far as his memory 
serves him, trace the connection of each of his past actions 
with a motive, and of the motives with his pre-existing char- 
acter and the circumstances which surrounded him, and thus 
construct a sort of miniature philosophy of his owm history. 
Yet every man knows that by the exertion of his own w^ill 
he might have made his life other than it has been. 

As to the theory of history which I have ventured to pro- 



THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 183 

pound, viz., that its key is to be found, not, as Mr. Buckle 
maintains, in the progress of science, but in the formation of 
man's character, which is pre-eminently religious and moral, 
I hope there is nothing on the face of that theory disgrace- 
fully irrational. Its truth or falsehood can be satisfactorily 
determined only when it has been applied to the facts of 
history. Few, at all events, Avill doubt that to write the 
history of man worthily, it is necessary to get to the very 
core of humanity, in which case " religion and morality" 
can hardly be excluded from consideration. 

I emphatically repeat that I have no desire to obstruct the 
formation of a new science. I will reverently accept it when 
it is formed, in the fullest faith that it will be elevating as 
well as beneficial to mankind. But we may be allowed to 
think that there are such things as chimeras in the intel- 
lectual world, and that some of them are pernicious, even 
though they may be patronized by very excellent people. 
"Mr. Mill" and " Miss Martineau" are active thinkers, and 
persons of corresponding moral vigor ; but it does not follow 
that their qualities will descend to those who are imbued 
with their theories, any more than the purity of Epicurus 
descended to the Epicureans, or the fiery energy of Moham- 
med to the fatalistic Turk. As to " Sir G. C. Lewis," there 
is not a line in his works which warrants the "Westmin- 
ster" in appealing to his name. 

Suppose the Scotch were to accept as true the very defect- 
ive, inaccurate, and misleading analysis which Mr. Buckle 
has given of their history ; they would be led at once to 
discard that which, with all its imperfections and drawbacks, 
has been the root of their greatness as a nation. No regard 
for politeness could hinder me from calling such a conse- 
quence pernicious. 

I drew a parallel between the circumstances of the present 



184 THE MORAL FREEDOM OF MAN. 

day and those of the last century ; and I will conclude with 
some words of Dugald Stewart, written at the end of the 
last century, which, if not strictly relevant to the present 
question, have, I think, a bearing on it, and are good in 
themselves : " That implicit credulity is a mark of a feeble 
mind will not be disputed ; but it may not perhaps be as 
generally acknowledged that the case is the same with un- 
limited skepticism. On the contrary, we are sometimes apt 
to ascribe this disposition to a more than ordinary vigor 
of intellect. Such a prejudice was by no means unnatural 
at that period in the history of modern Europe when reason 
first began to throw off the yoke of authority, and when it 
unquestionably required a superiority of understanding as 
well as of intrepidity for an individual to resist the conta- 
gion of a prevailing superstition. But in the present age, 
in which the tendency of fashionable opinions is directly 
opposite to those of the vulgar, the philosophical creed, the 
philosophical skepticism of by far the greater number of 
those who value themselves on an emancipation from popu- 
lar errors, arises from the very same weakness with the cre- 
dulity of the multitude; nor is it going too far to say, with 
Rousseau, that ' he who in the end of the eighteenth century 
has brought himself to abandon all his early principles with- 
out discrimination, would probably have been a bigot in the 
days of the League.'" liim, etc., 

GoLDWiN Smith. 
Oxford, Nov. 18, 18G1. 



ON THE 



FOUNDATION OF THE MERICM COLONIES. 



Colony is an ambiguous word : the Phoenician colo- 
nies were factories ; the Koman colonies were garrisons ; 
the Spanish colonies were gold mines, worked by slaves ; 
France justly placed the products of her Algerian colony 
in our Exhibition under the heading "Ministry of War." 
The Greek cities, in the hour of their greatness, founded 
new cities the counterparts of themselves. England has 
had the honor — an honor which no disaster can now 
rend from her — of becoming the parent of new nations. 
To colonize in this the highest sense is the attribute of 
freedom. Freedom only can give the necessary self-re- 
liance. In freedom only can the habit of self-govern- 
ment requisite for a young community be formed. The 
life of the plant must be diffused through all its parts, or 
its cuttings will not grow. 

It is evidently a law of Providence that man shall 
spread over the earth, make it fruitful, fill it with moral 
being. When all its powers are brought into play, when 
it has a civilized nation on every shore, when the instru- 
ment is, as it were, fully strung, we know not what har- 



186 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

mony may result. The great migrations of mankind are 
the great epochs of history. In the East, the succession 
of empires has been formed by the successive descents 
of warlike tribes on the plains of Mesopotamia, on the 
countries bordering the Persian Gulf, on Hindostan and 
China. In the "West, the evidence which tends to prove 
that the Greek and Eoman aristocracies were conquer- 
ing races, tends also to prove that Greece and Kome were 
the offspring of migrations. The migration of the Ger- 
man tribes into the Eoman empire divides ancient from 
modern, heathen from Christian history. So far the pro- 
pelling cause was the want of fresh pastures, or, at high- 
est, the restlessness of conscious strength, the sight of ill- 
defended wealth, the allurements of sunnier lands. The 
American colonies are the offspring of humanity at a 
more advanced stage and in a nobler mood. They arose 
from discontent, not with exhausted pastures, but with 
institutions that were waxing old, and a faith that was 
ceasing to be divine. They are monuments of that vast 
and various movement of humanity, the significance of 
which is but half expressed by the name of the Eeforma- 
tion. They are still receiving recruits from a movement 
which is now going on similar to the movement of the 
sixteenth century, and perhaps not less momentous, 
though, as we are still in the midst of it, not so clearly 
understood. The enterprises of the Puritans, like their 
worship, seemed to our forefathers eccentricities, disturb- 
ing for a moment the eternal order of society and the 
Church ; but that which in the eyes of man is eccentrici- 
ty, is sometimes in the course of Providence the central 
power. 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 187 

Before the actual commencement of the Eeformation 
European society began to feel those blind motions of the 
blood which told that the world's year had turned, and 
that the Middle Ages were drawing to their close. A 
general restlessness showed itself, among other ways, in 
maritime adventure. The Columbus of England was 
John Cabot, borrowed, like the Columbus of Spain, from 
a nation which, crushed at home, put forth its greatness 
in other lands. At the close of the fifteenth century, 
John Cabot, with his more famous son Sebastian, sailed 
from Bristol, the queen, and now, with its quaint streets 
and beautiful church, the monument, of English com- 
merce, as English commerce was in its more romantic 
and perhaps its nobler hour. The adventurers put forth, 
graciously authorized by King Henry VII. to discover a 
new world at their own risk and charge, and to hold it 
as vassals of his crown, landing always at his port of 
Bristol, and paying him one fifth of the gains forever. 
This royal grant of the earth to man, like similar grants 
made by the Papacy, may provoke a smile, but it was 
the same delusion which in after times cost tears and 
blood. The reward of the Cabots was the discovery of 
North America; and Sebastian, in his second voyage, 
saw the sun of the arctic summer night shine upon the 
icebergs of the pole. The great Elizabethan mariners 
took up the tale. They had two aims — gold, and the 
northwest passage to the treasures of the East. Without 
chart or guide, with only, to use their own phrase, a 
" merrie wind," they went forth on voyages which might 
have appalled a Franklin, as free and fearless as a child 
at play. Frobisher sailed north of Hudson's Strait in a 



188 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

bark of twenty -five tons. As he dropped down the 
Thames, Elizabeth graciously waved her hand to an en 
terprise for which she had done nothing; a great art 
and one which has something to give the queen her ped 
estal in history. Gilbert, with a little fleet of boats rath 
er than ships, took possession for England of Newfound 
land. As he was on his way homeward, off Cape Bre 
ton, in a wild night, the lights of his little vessel disap 
peared. The last words he had been heard to say were 
" Heaven is as near by sea as it is by land." 

Gold lured these adventurers to discover countries, as 
it lured the alchemist to found a science. In their thirst 
for gold they filled their ships with yellow earth. Had 
that yellow earth really been the precious metal, it would 
have made the finders richer only for an hour, and 
brought confusion upon commerce and the whole estate 
of man. The treasures of the precious metals seem to 
be so laid that new stores may be found only when the 
circle of trade is greatly enlarged, and the wealth of 
mankind greatly increased. And if the precious metals 
are the only or the best circulating medium, and it is 
necessary that the balance between them and the sum of 
human wealth should be preserved, this may perhaps be 
reckoned among the proofs that the earth is adapted to 
the use of man. 

England had a keen race for North America with 
Spain and France. The name of Espiritu Santo Bay, 
on the coast of Florida, commemorates the presence of 
those devout adventurers who marched with a train of 
priests, with all the paraphernalia of the mass, with 
blood-hounds to hunt the natives and chains to bind 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 189 

them. Spanish, keels first floated on the imperial waters 
and among the primeval forests of the Mississippi. The 
name of Carolina, a settlement planned bj Coligny, is a 
monument fixed by the irony of fate to the treacherous 
friendship of Charles IX. with the Huguenots on the eve 
of the St. Bartholomew. North America would have 
been ill lost to the Spaniard ; it would not have been so 
ill lost to the Huguenot. 

But the prize was to be ours. After roaming for a 
century from Florida to Greenland, English enterprise 
furled its wandering sail upon a shore which to its first 
explorers seemed a paradise, and called the land Vir- 
ginia, after the Virgin Queen. Ealeigh was deep in this 
venture, as his erratic spirit was deep in all the ventures, 
commercial, political, military, and literary, of that stir- 
ring and prolific time. So far as his own fortunes were 
concerned, this scheme, like most of his other schemes, 
was a brilliant failure. In after times North Carolina 
called her capital by his name — 

" Et nunc servat honor sedem tuus, ossaque nomen 
Hesperia in magna, siqua est ea gloria, signat" — 

if that can appease the injured, unhappy, and heroic 
shade. 

Virginia had seemed an earthly paradise. But on 
reading igitently the annals of colonization, we soon dis- 
cover how hard it is for man to fix his dwelling where 
his fellow has never been ; how he sinks and perishes 
before the face, grand and lovely though it be, of colos- 
sal, unreclaimed, trackless nature. The Virginian colo- 
nists had among them too many broken gentlemen, 
tradesmen, and serving -men, too few who were good 



190 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

hands at the axe and spade. They had come to a land 
of promise in expectation of great and speedy gains, and 
it seems clear that great and speedy gains are not to be 
made by felling primeval woods. That the enterprise 
was not abandoned was due in a great measure to the 
cheering presence of a wild adventurer, named Captain 
John Smith, who, turned by his kind relations as a boy 
upon a stirring world, with ten shillings in his pocket, 
and that out of his own estate, had, before he was thirty, 
a tale to tell of wars in the Low Countries and against 
the Turks, of battles and single combats, of captivities, 
of wanderings and voyages in all quarters of the globe, 
as strange and moving as the tale of Othello ; and who, 
if he did not win a Desdemona, won a Turkish princess 
to save him from the bowstring at Adrianople, and an 
Indian princess to save him from the tomahawk in Vir- 
ginia. Again and again the settlement was recruited 
and re-supplied. The original colony of Ealeigh quite 
died out, and upon the place of its transient abode na- 
ture resumed her immemorial reign. The settlement 
was made good under James I., and at last prospered by 
the cultivation <3f tobacco, so that the royal author of the 
"Counterblast" unwillingly became the patron of the 
staple he most abhorred. Even this second colony once 
re-embarked in despair, and was turned back by the 
long-boat of the vessel which brought it re-enforcements 
and supplies. 

To mankind the success of the Virginian colony proved 
but a doubtful boon. The tobacco was cultivated first 
by convicts, then by negro slaves. The Dutch brought 
the first cargo of negroes to the colony ; but the guilt of 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 191 

this detested traffic does not rest in any especial manner 
on the Dutch: the whole of commercial Europe was 
tainted with the sin. Sir John Hawkins, Elizabeth's 
gallant admiral, was a slaver, and the crown itself was 
not ashamed to share his gains. The cities of Spain 
were seats of the slave-trade as well as of religious per- 
secutions ; and both these deadly diseases of humanity 
had been stimulated by the Crusades. Even the Puri- 
tans of ISTew England were preserved from the contagion 
rather by their energetic industry as free laborers, and 
the nobility of their character, than by clear views of 
right. They denounced kidnapping; they forbad slav- 
ery to be perpetual; but bondage in itself seemed to 
them lawful because it was Jewish. It is an additional 
reason for dealing carefully with the subject of Jewish 
history and the Jewish law, when we see them wrested 
as they are to the defense of slavery, with all its abysses 
of cruelty and lust. To put the case as low as possible, 
Can those who support slavery by Jewish precedents say 
that the Jews for whom Moses legislated possessed that 
definite conviction of the immortality of the soul, that 
clear conception of the spiritual life and of the spiritual 
relations of man to man, on which the loathsomeness of 
slaveowning in a Christian's eyes principally depends? 
Nor, again, must slaveowners fancy they are counterparts 
of English gentlemen. It has been remarked that En- 
glish gentlemen, when owners of West Indian property, 
shrank with a half-honorable inconsistency from living 
on their estates and plying the trade of the slaveowner, 
though they did not shrink from taking the slaveowner's 
gains. To continue a slaveowner, the American must be 



192 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

false, not only to Christianity, but to all that is proud 
and high in the great race from which he springs. The 
growth of trade has necessarily rendered the system 
more mercenary, cold-blooded, and vile. It was milder 
and more patriarchal in the hands of the Virginian gen- 
tlemen of earlier days. "Washington himself was a Vir- 
ginian slaveowner, the best of slaveowners, and therefore 
a strong though temperate advocate for the immediate 
abolition of the slave-trade, and the progressive emanci- 
pation of the slaves. Jefferson, the first president of the 
party which now upholds slavery, and, like Washington, 
a Virginian proprietor, also spoke strong words, uttered 
terrible warnings, though political passion made him 
partly faithless to the cause. England indeed owes the 
American slaveowner charity and patience, for she was 
the full accomplice, if she was not the author of his guilt. 
In the treaty of Utrecht we bargained with Spain for a 
share in the negro trade; and Queen Anne mentioned 
this article in her speech to Parliament as one of the tro- 
phies of a war undertaken to save the liberties of Europe. 
It is true the spirit of William surviving in his council- 
ors made the war, the spirit of Bolingbroke made the 
peace. But long after the peace of Utrecht, down to the 
very eve of our rupture with the American colonies, we 
encouraged, we enforced the trade, and in our West In- 
dian slave colonies we kept up the focus of the pestilence. 
Still, we have purged ourselves of the stain. The Amer- 
ican slave states were in their own hands, they were fresh 
in the enjoyment of their own liberties, the declaration 
of the Rights of Man was on their lips, the case was not 
desperate, the cause was earnestly pleaded before them, 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 193 

when they in effect determined that they would let slav- 
ery be as it had been. Then their good angel left their 
side. 

There is in America another race, less injured than the 
negro, but scarcely less unhappy. The first English ex- 
plorers of Virginia brought word that they had been "en- 
tertained by the Indians with all love and kindness, and 
with as much bounty, after their manner, as they could 
possibly devise ; and that they found them a people most 
gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, 
and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age." 
These loving entertainments and this golden age were 
soon followed by an iron age of suspicion, hatred, en- 
croachment, border warfare, treacherous and murderous 
onfalls of the weaker on the stronger, bloody vengeance 
of the stronger on the weaker. And now it seems there 
will soon be nothing left of the disinherited race but the 
strange music of its names mingling with the familiar 
names of England in the hills and rivers of its ancient 
heritage. Yet its blood is not on the heads of those who 
dwell in its room. They, indeed, have turned the wil- 
derness over which it wandered into the cities and corn- 
fields of a great nation, and in so doing they have obeyed 
the law of Providence, which has given the earth, not for 
the dominion, but for the support of man. They con- 
jured the phantom of the Indian hunter's proprietary 
right by the forms of treaty and purchase. They did 
not seek to exterminate, they did not seek to enslave; 
they did seek to civilize and convert. Protestantism in 
its noblest and purest form, and the better spirit of Jes- 
uitism — the spirit, that is, of Xavier and not of Loyola — 

I 



194 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

vied with each other in doiDg all that religion could do 
to elevate and save. The marriage of an Indian princess 
with an Englishman was hailed as an auspicious pledge 
of the union of the two races under one name and with 
one God. But the fate of savages brought abruptly into 
contest with civilization has every where been the same. 
Never, says an eminent writer, have they been reclaimed 
except by religion. It is the exception that is doubtful. 
Where are the reclaimed, or rather the domesticated sav- 
ages of Paraguay, whose dwindling numbers, even under 
the Jesuit rule, were kept up by decoying recruits from 
neighboring tribes ? What do we hear as to the proba- 
ble fate of the reclaimed savages of New Zealand? It- 
seems as though to pass at a bound from the lowest step 
in the scale to the highest were not given to man ; as 
though to attempt it, even with the best aid, were to die. 
Mere savages the Indians seem to have been, though 
America has filled the void of romance in her history 
with their transfigured image. They knew the simpler 
arts of life; they had great acuteness of sense, and forti- 
tude equaled only by their cruelty ; but they lived and 
died creatures of the hour, caring not for the past or for 
the future, keeping no record of their forefathers, not 
storing thought, without laws and government but those 
of a herd, using the imagery of sense, their seeming elo- 
quence, only because they lacked the language of the 
mind, having no religion but a vague awe, which fixed 
on every thing terrible or marvelous as a god. Yet they 
did not exist in vain. Without their presence, their aid, 
slight as it was, their guidance, the heart of the wanderer 
would perhaps have utterly sunk in that vast solitude, 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 195 

then a world away from home and succor. The animal 
perfection of their lower nature enabled them to struggle 
with and thread the wilderness, the horrors of which 
their want of the finer nature made them all the more 
fit to bear. They were the pioneers of a higher state of 
things ; and perhaps we, heirs as we seem to ourselves 
of all the ages, may to the late heirs of our age seem no 
more. 

Virginia then went prosperously, as it was thought, 
upon her course, the destined centre and head of the 
slave states. Her own society and that of the adjoining 
states, which took their color from her, was old English 
society, as far as might be, in a new land. The royal 
governors were little kings. There was no aristocracy 
as in England, but there was a landed gentry with aristo- 
cratic pride. There was, down to the Eevolution, the 
English rule of primogeniture in the succession to land. 
The Church of England was the church of the colony, 
half established, and a little inclined to intolerance. In 
Virginia many of the Cavaliers took refuge in their evil 
hour. In Virginia Charles II. reigned while he was pro- 
scribed in England. In Virginia a royal governor could 
say, as late as 1671, "I thaj^ God there are no free- 
schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them 
these hundred years ; for learning has brought disobedi- 
ence, and misery, and sects into the world, and printing 
has divulged them, and libels against the best govern- 
ment. God keep us from both." 

Meantime, far north, where the eastern mountains of 
America press the sea, in a bracing climate, on a soil 
which demands free labor, another colony had been form- 



196 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

ed, of other materials, and with a different aim. Of a 
poor Puritan teacher, more truly than of the royal re- 
storer of Virginia, might it have been prophesied — 

"Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, 
His honor and the greatness of his name 
Shall be, and make new nations." 

When the Presbyterian James mounted the throne, the 
persecuted Puritans thought a better day had dawned. 
They were quickly undeceived. The sagacious eye of 
the royal Solomon at once discerned how much the 
throne would be strengthened and secured by that com- 
pact alliance with a party in the Church, which soon laid 
church and throne together in the dust. At the Hamp- 
ton Court Conference he revealed at once his purpose 
and his nature by speaking foul, unkingly words to the 
honored leaders of that great party whose heroic energy, 
shining forth in famous soldiers and famous statesmen, 
had saved England and the English crown from Spain. 
Under the vigilant eye and zealous hand of Bancroft, the 
persecution grew hotter and more searching than before. 
The tale that follows has been often told. A Puritan 
congregation on the confines of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, 
and Nottinghamshire, wh(|p teacher's name was Eobin- 
son, harassed beyond endurance, resolved to leave all 
they had and fly to Holland, there to worship God in 
peace. They accordingly attempted to escape, were ar- 
rested, set free again ; again they attempted to escape, 
were pursued by the agents of persecution to the shore, 
and part of them seized, but again with difficulty let go. 
In Holland the congregation dwelt twelve years, devout, 
industrious, blameless, no man, said the Dutch magis- 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 197 

trates, bringing suit or accusation against them ; the liv- 
ing image of that for which we gaze into the darkness of 
the first two centuries in vain. But the struggle for 
bread was hard. The children grew sickly and bent 
with toil before their time. There was war in Germany. 
The cities of the Low Countries were full of loose and 
roving soldiery, and Holland itself was torn by the bloody 
struggle between the Arminians and the Gomarists. 
Some of the younger members of the congregation fell 
into evil courses, enlisted, went to sea. Then with 
prayer and fasting the congregation turned their thoughts 
to the New World. The Dutch, learning their intention, 
bid high for them, knowing well the value of such set- 
tlers. But that which they did they would do as En- 
glishmen, and for the honor of their own land. They 
made their suit through friends in England to the king 
and the Virginia Company ; spoke dutifully of the royal 
authority, meekly of the authority of bishops ; repre- 
sented that, though the enterprise was dangerous — and 
to peasants like them it was dangerous indeed — though 
the honor of it might be bought with life, yet in their 
case, no common one, it would be rightly undertaken, 
and they were not unfit to undertake it. "We are well 
weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, 
and inured to the difficulties of a strange land. The 
people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together 
in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation 
whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue where- 
of we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each oth- 
er's good and of the whole. It is not with us as with 
men whom small things can discourage." The Virginia 



198 ON- THE FOUNDATION OF 

Company gave hesitating assistance and a worthless pat- 
ent. The king and the bishops held out fair hopes of 
beneficent neglect. " Ungrateful Americans !" cried a 
minister in a debate on the Stamp Act. " Planted by 
our care," cried another minister, "nourished up by our 
indulgence, will they grudge to contribute their mite to 
relieve us from the heavy burden we lie under?" 

Through the solemn sadness of the parting from Delft 
Haven shone the glory of great things to come. History 
reveals abysses which, if her evidence were all, might 
make us doubt which power it was that ruled the world. 
But history bears steady witness to the lasting ascend- 
ency of moral over physical force. All rhetoric apart, 
those masters of thirty legions, who with so much blood 
and din shift to and fro the boundaries of kingdoms, go 
to dust, and, saving the evil they leave behind them, are 
as though they had never been ; but these poor peasants, 
at small charge to the Virginia Company, became in a 
real sense the founders of a new world. 

It was not from Delft Haven, but from Southampton, 
that they finally embarked. England deserved that hon- 
or at their hands, for they went forth, though not from 
the English government, from the heart of the English 
people. Of their two little vessels, the " Speedwell" 
leaked, and was forced to put back, with the weaker 
bodies and fainter spirits in her. The " Mayflower" 
went on her way alone ; she went safely through storms, 
carrying greater fortunes than those of C^sar. On Sat- 
urday, the 11th of November, 1620, she dropped her an- 
chor on a wintry coast, and next day the Puritan kept 
his first Sabbath in his own land. He kept that Sabbath 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 199 

sacred in his extremity ; and, amid tlie keen race for 
wealth, his descendants keep it sacred still. The wel- 
come of the Puritans to their home was the wilderness in 
all its horrors, checkered by a ^ew signs of Indian life, 
and soon by a volley of Indian arrows ; snow ; frost that 
made the wet clothes of the explorers stiff as iron ; hun- 
ger that drove them to feed on shell-fish ; deadly fever 
and consumption. More than half the number died : the 
survivors had scarce strength to bury the dead by the 
sea and conceal the graves, lest the Indians might per- 
ceive how the colony was weakened. The mortal strug- 
gle lasted for two years. Yet this colony did not, like 
Virginia, require to be re-founded, not even to be re-vict- 
naled. ''It is not with us as with men whom small 
things can discourage." The third summer brought a 
good harvest, and the victory was won. "Let it not be 
grievous to you," said the Puritans in England — " let it 
not be grievous to you that you have been instruments 
to break the ice for others. The honor shall be yours to 
the world's end." 

Before the Pilgrims landed, they by a solemn instru- 
ment founded the Puritan republic. The tone of this in- 
strument and the success of its authors may afford a les- 
son to revolutionists who sever the present from the past 
with the guillotine, fling the illustrious dead out of their 
tombs, and begin history again with the year one. These 
men had been wronged as much as the Jacobins. 

" In the name of God. Amen. We whose names are 
underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign 
Lord King James, by the grace of God of Great Britain 
and Ireland, defender of the faith, etc., having undertaken. 



200 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian 
faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to 
plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, 
do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the pres- 
ence of God and of one another, covenant and combine 
ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better 
ordering and preservation, and for the furtherance of the 
ends aforesaid ; and by virtue hereof to exact, constitute, 
and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances and acts, 
constitutions and ofi&ces, from time to time, as shall be 
thought most meet for the general good of the colony, 
unto which we promise all due submission and obedi- 
ence." And then follows the roll of plebeian names, to 
which the Eoll of Battle Abbey is a poor record of no- 
bility. 

There are points in history at which the spirit which 
moves the whole shows itself more clearly through the 
outward frame. This is one of them. Here we are pass- 
ing from the feudal age of privilege and force, to the age 
of due submission and obedience, to just and equal of&ces 
and laws, for our better ordering and preservation. In 
this political covenant of the Pilgrim fathers lies the Amer- 
ican Declaration of Independence. From the American 
Declaration of Independence was borrowed the French 
Declaration of the Eights of Man. France, rushing ill- 
prepared, though with overweening confidence, on the 
great problems of the eighteenth century, shattered not 
her own hopes alone, but nearly at the same moment 
the Puritan Eepublic, breaking the last slight link that 
bound it to feudal Europe, and placing modern society 
firmly and tranquilly on its new foundation. To the free 



THE AMEKICAN COLONIES. 201 

States of America we owe our best assurance that the 
oldest, the most famous, the 'most cherished of human 
institutions are not the life, nor would their fall be the 
death, of social man ; that all which comes of Charle- 
magne, and all which comes of Constantino, might go to 
the tombs of Charlemagne and Constantine, and yet social 
duty and affection, religion and worship, free obedience to 
good government, free reverence for just laws, continue 
as before. They who have achieved this have little need 
to talk of Bunker's Hill. 

Not that republicanism in New England is all its 
founders expected it to be. "Our popularity," said the 
framers of the popular constitution of Ehode Island — 
"our popularity shall not, as some conjecture it will, 
prove an anarchy, and so a common tyranny ; for we are 
exceedingly desirous to preserve every man safe in his 
person, name, and estate." That might be said confi- 
dently of a quiet agricultural community of small pro- 
prietors, which could not be so confidently said of great 
trading communities with vast and restless cities. But 
the Puritan institutions have had other difiiculties to con- 
tend with, for which fair allowance must be made. The 
stream of English and German, the torrent of Irish emi- 
gration, relieving other countries of a great danger, casts 
on the Eepublic a multitude of discontented and lawless 
spirits, far removed from the restraining influences of 
their native land, from the eye of neighbors, friends, and 
kinsmen, from the church-bells of their home. The incon- 
gruous and fatal union of the free with the slave states, 
for which those who drove them all to combine against 
English tyranny are partly responsible, has brought upon 

12 



202 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

the constitution the tremendous strain of tlie great slave- 
ry question, and led to that deadly alliance between the 
Southern slaveowner and the JSTorthern anarchist which 
calls itself the Democratic party. The rupture with the 
English monarchy gave the states a violent bias toward 
democracy, which they were far from exhibiting before, 
and set up the revolutionary doctrine of the sovereign 
people, which tends as much as any other despotic doc- 
trine to annul the greatest step in the progress of hu- 
manity by placing will, though it be the will of the many, 
above reason and the law. To crown all comes the pois- 
onous influence of the elective presidency, the great prize 
of restless and profligate ambition ; the fountain of envy, 
malignity, violence, and corruption ; the object of factions 
otherwise as devoid of object and of meaning as Neri and 
Bianchi, Caravat and Shanavest ; in their fierce struggles 
for which American statesmen have too often shown that, 
if pubHc life is the noblest of all callings, it is the vilest 
of all trades. The Diet of the Swiss Confederation, pre- 
sided over by the first magistrate of the leading canton 
for the year, would have furnished a happier model. The 
character of Washington is one of the glories of our race; 
but was he a man of genius ? Did he see that he had to 
frame a Constitution for a confederacy of republics, not 
for a nation ? Did not the image of the English mon- 
archy, something of the state of which he thought it his 
duty as President to keep, hover too much before his 
eyes? Yet, as he looked for the progressive abolition 
of slavery, he must be acquitted of so terrible an error as 
an attempt to make one nation of the slave and free. 
Happily, political institutions kill as seldom as they cure, 



THE AMERICAN" COLONIES. 203 

and the real current of a great nation's life may run 
calmly beneath the seething and frothy surface which 
alone meets our eyes. 

With popular government the Puritans established 
popular education. They are the great authors of the 
system of common schools. They founded a college too, 
and that in dangerous and pinching times. JSTor did their 
care fail, nor is it failing, to produce an intelligent people. 
A great literature is a thing of slow growth every where. 
The growth of American literature was retarded at first 
by Puritan severity, which forced even philosophy to put 
on a theological garb, and veiled the Necessarianism of 
Mr. Mill in the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards. Now, 
perhaps, its growth is retarded by the sudden burst of 
commercial activity and wealth, the development of which 
our monopolies long restrained. One day, perhaps, this 
wealth may be used as nobly as the wealth of Florence ; 
but for some time it will be spent in somewhat coarse 
pleasures by those who have suddenly won it. It is 
spent in somewhat coarse pleasures by those who have 
suddenly won it at Liverpool and Manchester, as well as 
at New York. One praise, at any rate, American litera- 
ture may claim — it is pure. Here the spirit of the Pil- 
grims still holds its own. The public opinion of a free 
country is a restraining as well as a moving power. On 
the other hand, despotism, political or ecclesiastical, does 
not extinguish human liberty. That it may take away 
the liberty of reason, it gives the liberty of sense. It 
says to man, Do what you will, sin and shrive yourself; 
but eschew political improvement, and turn away your 
thoughts from truth. 



204 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

The history of the Puritan Church in New England 
is one of enduring glory, of transient shame. Of tran- 
sient shame, because there was a moment of intolerance 
and persecution; of enduring glory, because intolerance 
and persecution instantly gave way to perfect liberty of 
conscience and free allegiance to the truth. The found- 
ers of New England were Independents. When they 
went forth, their teacher had solemnly charged them to 
follow him no farther than they had seen him follow his 
Master. He had pointed to the warning example of 
churches which fancied that because Calvin and Luther 
were great and shining lights in their times, therefore 
there could be no light vouchsafed to man after theirs. 
"I beseech you remember it; it is an article of your 
Church covenant that you be ready to receive whatever 
truth shall be made known to you from the written word 
of God." It was natural that the Puritan settlement 
should at first be a Church rather than a State. To have 
given a share in its lands or its political franchise to 
those who were not of its communion would have been 
to make the receiver neither rich nor powerful, and the 
giver, as he might well think, poor and weak indeed. 
But the Communion grew into an Establishment; and 
the Puritan Synod, as well as the Council of Trent, must 
needs forget that it was the child of change, and build 
its barrier, though not a very unyielding one, across the 
river which flows forever. Ehode Island, Connecticut, 
New Hampshire, were partly secessions from Massachu- 
setts, led by those who longed for perfect freedom ; and 
in fairness to Massachusetts it must be said that among 
those seceders were some in whose eyes freedom herself 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 205 

was scarcely free. The darkness of the Middle Ages 
must bear the blarae if not a few were dazzled by the sud- 
den return of light. The name of Providence, the capi- 
tal of Ehode Island, is the thank-offering of Eoger Wil- 
liams, to whose wayward and disputatious spirit much 
may be forgiven if he first clearly proclaimed, and first 
consistenly practiced, the perfect doctrine of liberty of 
conscience, the sole guarantee for real religion, the sole 
trustworthy guardian of the truth. That four Quakers 
should have suffered death in a colony founded by fugi- 
tives from a persecution is a stain on the history of the 
free churches of America, like the stain on the robe of 
Marcus Aurelius, like the stain on the escutcheon of the 
Black Prince. It is true there was no Inquisition, no 
searching of conscience ; that the persecutors warned 
their victims away, and sought to be quit of them, not to 
take their blood ; that the Quakers thrust themselves on 
their fate in their frenzied desire for martyrdom. All this 
at most renders less deep by one degree the dye of relig- 
ious murder. The weapon was instantly wrested from 
the hand of fanaticism by the humane instinct of a free 
people, and the blood of those four victims sated in the 
New World the demon who, in the Old World, between 
persecutions and religious wars, has drunk the blood of 
millions, and is scarcely sated yet. If the robe of religion 
in the New World was less rich than in the Old, it was 
all but pure of those red stains, compared with which the 
stains upon the robe of worldly ambition, scarlet though 
they be, are white as wool. In the New World there 
was no Inquisition, no St. Bartholomew, no Thirty Years' 
War: in the New World there was no Yoltaire. If we 



206 OJSr THE FOUNDATION OF 

would do Yoltaire justice, criminal and fatal as his de- 
structive levity was, we have only to read his " Cry of 
Innocent Blood," and we shall see that the thing he as- 
sailed was not Christianity, much less God. The Ameri- 
can sects, indeed, soon added to the number of those vari- 
ations of the Protestant churches which, contrasted with 
the majestic unity of Eome, furnished a proud argument 
to Bossuet. Had Bossuet lived to see what came forth 
at the Eevolution from under the unity of the Church of 
France, he might have doubted whether unity was so 
united ; as, on the other hand, if he had seen the practi- 
cal union of the free churches of America for the weight- 
ier matters of religion, which De Tocqueville observed, 
he might have doubted whether variation was so various. 
It would have been too much to ask a Bossuet to consid- 
er whether, looking to the general dealings of Providence 
with man, the variations of free and conscientious inquir- 
ers are an absolute proof that free and conscientious in- 
quiry is not the road to religious truth. 

In Maryland, Eoman Catholicism, itself, having tasted 
of the cup it had made others drink to the dregs, and 
being driven to the asylum of oppressed consciences, 
proclaimed the principle of toleration. In Maryland the 
Church of Alva and Torquemada grew, bloodless and 
blameless ; and thence it has gone forth, as it was in its 
earlier and more apostolic hour, to minister to the now 
large Eoman Catholic population of the United States 
whatever of good and true, in the great schism of hu- 
manity, may have remained on the worse and falser side. 
For in Maryland it had no overgrown wealth and power 
to defend against the advance of truth. Bigotry, the 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 207 

mildest of all vices, has the worst things laid to her charge. 
That wind of free discipline which, to use Bacon's image, 
winnows the chaff of error from the grain of truth, is in 
itself welcome to man as the breeze of evening. It is 
when it threatens to winnow awaj, not the chaff of error 
alone, but princely bishoprics of Strasburg and Toledo, 
that its breath becomes pestilence, and Christian love is 
compelled to torture and burn the infected sheep, in or- 
der to save from infection the imperiled flock. 

There have been wild religious sects in America. But 
can not history show sects as wild in the Old World ? 
Is not Mormonism itself fed by the wild apocalyptic vis- 
ions, and the dreams of a kinder and happier social state, 
which haunt the peasantry in the more neglected parts 
of our own country? Have not the wildest and most 
fanatical sects in history arisen when the upper classes 
have turned rehgion into policy, and left the lower class- 
es, who knew nothing of policy, to guide or misguide 
themselves into the truth ? 

New England was fast peopled by the flower of the 
Puritan party, and the highest Puritan names were blend- 
ed with its history. Among its elective governors was 
Yane, even then wayward as pure, even then suspected 
of being more Eepublican than Puritan. It saw also the 
darker presence of Hugh Peters. While the day went 
hard with freedom and the Protestant cause in England, 
the tide set steadily westward ; it turned, when the hour 
of retaliation came, to the great Armageddon of West- 
minster and Naseby ; after the Eestoration it set to the 
West again. In New England Puritanism continued to 
reign with all that was solemn, austere, strange in its 



208 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

spirit, manners, language, garb, wlien in England its do- 
minion, degenerating into tyranny, had met -with a half- 
merited overthrow. In Kew England three of the judges 
of Charles I. found a safer refuge than Holland could af- 
ford, and there one of them lived to see the scales once 
more hung out in heaven, the better part of his own 
cause triumphant once more, and William sit on the 
Protector's throne. 

Among the emigrants were clergymen, Oxford and 
Cambridge scholars, high-born men and women, for in 
that moving age the wealthiest often vied with the poor- 
est in indifference to worldly interest and devotion to a 
great cause. Even peers of the Puritan party thought 
of becoming citizens of Massachusetts, but had enough 
of the peer in them to desire still to have an hereditary 
seat in the councils of the state. Massachusetts answered 
this demand by the hand of one who had himself made a 
great sacrifice, and without republican bluster : '' When 
God blesseth any branch of any noble or generous family 
with a spirit and gifts fit for government, it would be a 
taking of God's name in vain to put such a talent under 
a bushel, and a sin against the honor of magistracy to 
neglect such in our public elections. But if God should 
not delight to furnish some of their posterity with gifts 
fit for magistracy, we should enforce them rather to re- 
proach and prejudice than exalt them to honor, if we 
should call those forth whom God doth not to public au- 
thority." The Yenetian seems to be the only great aris- 
tocracy in history the origin of which is not traceable to 
the accident of conquest; and the origin even of the 
"Venetian aristocracy may perhaps be traced to the acci- 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 209 

dent of prior settlement and the contagious example of 
neighboring states. That which has its origin in acci- 
dent may prove useful and live long; it may even sur- 
vive itself under another name, as the Eoman patriciate, 
as the Norman nobility survived themselves under the 
form of a mixed aristocracy of birth, political influence, 
and wealth. But it can flourish only in its native soil. 
Transplant it, and it dies. The native soil of feudal aris- 
tocracy is a feudal kingdom, with great estates held to- 
gether by the law or custom of primogeniture in succes- 
sion to land. The New England colonies rejected primo- 
geniture with the other institutions of the Middle Ages, 
and adopted the anti-feudal custom of equal inheritance, 
under the legal and ancestral name of gavelkind. It 
was Saxon England emerging from the Norman rule. 
This rule of succession to property, and the equality with 
which it is distributed, are the basis of the republican in- 
stitutions of New England. To transfer those institu- 
tions to countries where that basis does not exist would 
be almost as absurd as to transfer to modern society the 
Eoman laws of the Twelve Tables or the Capitularies of 
Charlemagne. 

In New York, New Jersey, Delaware, settlements 
formed by the energy of Dutch and Swedish Protest- 
antism have been absorbed by the greater energy of the 
Anglo-Saxons. The rising empire of his faith beyond 
the Atlantic did not fail to attract the soaring imagina- 
tion of Gustavus ; it was in his thoughts when he set out 
for Llitzen. But the most remarkable of the American 
colonies, after the New England group, is Pennsylvania. 
We are rather surprised, on looking at the portrait of the 



210 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

gentle and eccentric founder of the Society of Friends, 
to see a very comely youth dressed in complete armor. 
Penn was a highly educated and accomplished gentle- 
man, heir to a fine estate, and to all the happiness and 
beauty, which he was not without a heart to feel, of En- 
glish manorial life. '' You are an ingenious gentleman," 
said a magistrate before whom he was brought for his 
Quaker extravagances ; "why do you make yourself un- 
happy by associating with such a simple people?" In 
the Old World he could only hope to found a society ; 
in the New World he might hope to found a nation, of 
which the law should be love. The Constitution he 
framed for Philadelphia, on pure republican principles, 
was to be "for the support of power in reverence with 
the people, and to secure the people from the abuse of 
power. For liberty without obedience is confusion, and 
obedience without liberty is slavery." He excluded 
himself and his heirs from the founder's bane of author- 
ity over his own creation. It is as a reformer of crim- 
inal law, perhaps, that he has earned his brightest and 
most enduring fame. The codes and customs of feudal 
Europe were lavish of servile or plebeian blood. In the 
republic of New England the life of every man was pre- 
cious, and the criminal law was far more humane than 
that of Europe, though tainted with the dark Judaism of 
the Puritans, with the cruel delusion which they shared 
with the rest of the world on the subject of witchcraft, 
and with their overstrained severity in punishing crimes 
of sense. Penn confined capital punishment to the crimes 
of treason and murder. Two centuries afterward, the ar- 
guments of Komilly and the legislation of Peel convinced 



' THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 211 

Penn's native country that these reveries of his, the dic- 
tates of wisdom which sprang from his heart, were sober 
truth. We are now beginning to see the reality of an- 
other of his dreams, the dream of making the prison not 
a jail only, but a place of reformation. Of the two errors 
in government, that of treating men like angels and that 
of treating them like beasts, he did something to show 
that the one to which he leaned was the less grave, for 
Philadelphia grew up like an olive-branch beneath his 
fostering hand. 

In the Carolinas, the old settlement of Coligny was re- 
peopled with English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Swiss, the 
motle}'' elements which will blend with Hollander and 
Swede to form in America the most mixed, and, on one 
theory, the greatest of all races. The philosophic hand 
of Locke attempted to create for this colony a highly 
elaborate Constitution, judged at the time a masterpiece 
of political art. Georgia bears the name of the second 
king of that line whose third king was to lose all. Its 
philanthropic founder, Oglethorpe, struggled to exclude 
slavery, but an evil policy and the neighborhood of the 
West Indies bafiled his endeavors. Here Wesley preach- 
ed, here Whitfield ; and Whitfield, too anxious to avoid 
offense that he might be permitted to save souls, paid a 
homage to the system of slavery, and made a sophistical 
apology for it, which weigh heavily against the merits of 
a great apostle of the poor. 

For some time all the colonies, whatever their nominal 
government, whether they were under the crown, under 
single proprietors, under companies, or under free char- 
ters, enjoyed, in spite of chronic negotiation and litigation 



212 ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

with the powers in England, a large measure of practical 
independence. James I. was weak ; Charles I. and Laud 
had soon other things to think of; the Long Parliament 
were disposed to be arrogant, but the Protector was mag- 
nanimous ; and finally, Charles II., careless of every thing 
on this side the water, was still more careless of every 
thing on that side, and Clarendon was not too stiff for 
prerogative to give a liberal charter to a colony of which 
he was himself a patentee. Eoyal governors, indeed, 
sometimes tried to overact the king, and the folly of Sir 
William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, all but forestall- 
ed, and well would it have been if it had quite forestalled, 
the folly of Lord ISTorth. With this exception, the colo- 
nies rested content and proud beneath the shadow of En- 
gland, and no thought of a general confederation or ab- 
solute independence ever entered into their minds. As 
they grew rich, we tried to interfere with their manufac- 
tures and monopolize their trade. It was unjust and it 
was foolish. The proof of its folly is the noble trade 
that has sprung up between us since our government 
lost all power of checking the course of nature. But 
this was the injustice and the folly of the time. No such 
excuse can be made for the attempt to tax the colonies 
— in defiance of the first principles of English govern- 
ment — begun by narrow-minded incompetence and con- 
tinued by insensate pride. It is miserable to see what 
true afiection was there flung away. Persecuted and ex- 
cited, the founders of New England, says one of their his- 
torians, did not cry Farewell Eome, Farewell Babylon ! 
They cried. Farewell dear England ! And this was their 
spirit even far into the fatal quarrel. ''You have been 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 213 

told," thej said to the British. Parliament, after the sub- 
version of the chartered liberties of Massachusetts, "you 
have been told that we are seditious, impatient of gov- 
ernment, and desirous of independence. Be assured that 
these are not facts, but calumnies. Permit us to be as 
free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a union with 
you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness ; 
we shall ever be ready to contribute all in our power to 
the welfare of the whole empire ; we shall consider your 
enemies as our enemies, and your interest as our own. 
But if you are determined that your ministers shall wan- 
tonly sport with the rights of mankind ; if neither the 
voice of justice, the dictates of law, the principles of the 
Constitution, nor the suggestions of humanity, can re- 
strain your hands from shedding human blood in such 
an impious cause, we must then tell you that we will 
never submit to be ' hewers of wood and drawers of wa- 
ter' for any nation in the world." What was this but 
the voice of those who framed the Petition of Eight and 
the Great Charter ? Franklin alone, perhaps, of the lead- 
ing Americans, by the dishonorable publication of an 
exasperating correspondence, which he had improperly 
obtained, shared with Grenville, Townshend, and Lord 
North the guilt of bringing this great disaster on the 
English race. There could be but one issue to a war in 
which England was JSghting against her better self, or 
rather in which England fought on one side, and a cor- 
rupt ministry and Parliament on the other. The Parlia- 
ment of that day was not national ; and though the na- 
tion was excited by the war when once commenced, it by 
no means follows that a national Parliament would have 
commenced it. The great national leader rejoiced that 



21-i ON THE FOUNDATION OF 

tlie Americans had resisted. But disease, or that worse 
enemy wbicli liovers so close to genius, deprived us of 
Chatham at the most critical hour. One thing there was 
in that civil war on which both sides may look back 
with pride. In spite of deep provocation and intense 
bitterness, in spite of the unwarrantable cmplo3anent of 
foreign troops and the infomous employment of Indians 
on our side, and the exasperating interference of the 
French on the side of the Americans, the struggle was 
conducted on the whole with great humanity. Com- 
pared with the French Eevolution, it was a contest be- 
tween men with noble natures and a fight between infu- 
riated beasts. Something, too, it is that from that strug- 
gle should have arisen the character of Washington, to 
teach all ages, and especially those which are inclined to 
worship violence, the greatness of moderation and civil 
duty. It has been truly said that there is one spectacle 
more grateful to Heaven than a good man in adversity — 
a good man successful in a great cause. Deeper happi- 
ness can not be conceived than that of the years which 
Washington passed at Mount Yernon, looking back upon 
a life of arduous command held without a selfish thought, 
and laid down without a stain. 

The loss of the American colonies was perhaps, in it- 
self, a gain to both countries. It was a gain as it eman- 
cipated commerce, and gave free course to those recipro- 
cal streams of wealth which a restrictive policy had for- 
bidden to flow. It was a gain as it put an end to an ob- 
solete tutelage, which tended to prevent America betimes 
to walk alone, while it gave England only the puerile 
and somewhat dangerous pleasure of reigning over those 
whom she did not and could not govern, but whom she 



THE AMERICAN COLONIES. 215 

was tempted to harass and insult. A source of military 
strength colonies can hardly be. You prevent them 
from forming proper military establishments of their 
own, and you drag them into your quarrels at the price 
of undertaking their defense. The inauguration of free 
trade was in fact the renunciation of the only solid ob- 
ject for which our ancestors clung to an invidious and 
perilous supremacy, and exposed the heart of England by 
scattering her fleets and armies over the globe. It was 
not the loss of the colonies, but the quarrel, that was one 
of the greatest, perhaps the greatest disaster that ever 
befell the English race. Who would not give up Blen- 
heim and Waterloo if only the two Englands could have 
parted from each other in kindness and in peace ; if our 
statesmen could have had the wisdom to say to the 
Americans generously and at the right season, "You are 
Englishmen like ourselves ; be, for your own happiness 
and our honor, like ourselves, a nation ?" But English 
statesmen, with all their greatness, have seldom known 
how to anticipate necessity ; too often the sentence of 
history on their policy has been that it was wise, just, 
and generous, but " too late." Too often have they 
waited for the teaching of disaster. Time will heal this, 
like other wounds. In signing away his own empire 
over America, George III. did not sign away the empire 
of English liberty, of English law, of English literature, 
of English religion, of English blood, or of the English 
tongue. But, though the wound will heal — and that it 
may heal ought to be the earnest desire of the whole 
English name — hi&tory can never cancel the fatal page 
which robs England of half the glory and half the hap- 
piness of being the mother of a great nation. 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 



It is with great pleasure that a student finds himself 
returning from the alien sphere of politics to the conge- 
nial sphere of letters, and from the region of national and 
party divisions to the fellowship of learning, undivided 
and perpetual. It is with especial pleasure than an En- 
glish student of history finds himself in the company of 
those who are pursuing the same study in America. The 
members of the Historical Society, kindly recognizing the 
bond of literary kindred, have invited me to take part in 
their proceedings this evening ; and I am told that I shall 
not be selecting an unacceptable theme for my remarks 
in directing your attention to some points connected with 
the history of one of the great Universities of our com- 
mon race. 

The name of Oxford calls up at once the image of ven- 
erable antiquity embodied in all the architectural beauty 
of the past. To the historic eye the city is, in fact, the 
annals of England written in gray stone. And those an- 
nals are a varied and moving tale. If you measure by 
mere time, the antiquity of the old cities of Christendom 
is but a span compared with the antiquity of Egypt ; but 
if you measure by history, it is rather the antiquity of 

K 



218 THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFOED. 

Egypt that is a span. " Those buildings must be very 
old," said an American visitor to his Oxford host, pointing 
to a very black-looking pile. "No," was the reply; "the 
color of the stone deceives you ; their age is only two 
hundred years." Two hundred years, though a great an- 
tiquity to the inhabitants of a new country, are but as the 
flight of a weaver's shuttle to the age of the Pyramids. 
It is by another measure that the age of such cities as 
Oxford must be meted. Between her earliest and latest 
monuments lies the whole intellectual history of Chris- 
tendom, from the very infancy of medij»val faith to this 
skeptical maturity (as it seems to us) of modern science, 
together with all the political, social, and ecclesiastical 
memories which intellectual history brings in its train. 
Movements and reactions, the ebb and flow of contending 
and fluctuating thought, have left their traces all around. 
As you walk those streets, you see, in the spirit of history, 
Duns Scotus and Eoger Bacon, Wickliffe, Erasmus, Wol- 
sey, the chiefs and martyrs of the Eeformation, Hooker, 
Laud, Butler, Shelley ; while you meet in the flesh the 
leaders, on the one hand, of the great Anglican — or rath- 
er Eomanizing — reaction, and, on the other, the leaders 
of what seems likely to prove a second and more com- 
plete Eeformation. 

Nowhere do you feel more intensely the power of the 
Past, and the ascendency of the d-ead over the living. 
This influence, in truth, weighs somewhat too heavily on 
the intellectual life of Oxford, while it is too feeble in the 
intellectual life of a new country like this. An Oxford 
student can preserve his independence, and even his in- 
dividual activity of mind, only by cultivating a very 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 219 

large and liberal interest in the general fortunes and des- 
tinies of humanity. 

Kor is the calmness of the past less felt in Oxford than 
its power. Thither turn your steps, if you desire to put 
off for a time the excitement of the passing hour. The 
keep of the Korman castle is that from which the Em- 
press Maud made her escape during the war in the time 
of Stephen. Merton College is a memorial of the Barons' 
war in the reign of Henry III. ; Magdalen of the wars of 
the Koses. Traces of the political and ecclesiastical strug- 
gle between Charles I. and the Commons are every where 
to be seen. Over the gate of University College stands 
the statue of James II., who, when he sojourned within 
those walls, was striking the last blow struck by a Stuart 
king for the Stuart cause. Five civil wars — with their 
divisions, that seemed eternal — their hatreds, that seemed 
inextricable — all turned to charitable memories and tran- 
quil dust. 

This spell of antiquity is potent enough to overpower 
even the presence of youth. When I left Oxford, in the 
dead quiet of the summer vacation, the colleges lay with 
their gray walls on their broad expanse of lawn, and 
among their immemorial trees, still and pensive as a vis- 
ion of the past. ISTow they are full, if not of the most 
profitable, of the merriest life on earth. Active forms 
move about the quadrangles, cheerful voices are heard 
from the windows which surround them. In the morn- 
ing the more industrious are engaged in their studies, full 
of the intellectual hopes of youth. In the afternoon there 
are parties going forth to and returning from their sports. 
Then the windows of the old dining-halls glow with a rud- 



220 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

dj light ; and soon after there come from other windows 
the sounds of merriment, which do not, in all cases, give 
place to the stillness of the student's evening task. If it 
were summer, we should have parties of students in very 
unacademical costumes coming back from the cricket- 
match or the boat-race ; and if a victory had been won, 
we should hear it celebrated in a way which would make 
the old walls ring — though, among a people trained to 
respect authority, the apparently uncontrollable wildness 
of the evening's festivities easily gives way to order in 
the morning. Yet all this no more dispels the pensive- 
ness that hangs round the ancient city than the bright 
green leaves of spring dispel the sombre tint of its walls. 
The impression, on the contrary, is rather made more in- 
tense by the contrast. The old dial, whose shadow has 
measured out so many lives, will soon measure out these 
also, little as youth may think of its end. The old clock 
will soon toll away this generation, as it has tolled away 
the generations that are gone. On the college books are 
written the names of the fathers of these youths, of their 
grandfathers, of their ancestors for centuries past. They 
too, when they wrote their names there, were young. 

Before entering on the history of Oxford, it will be as 
well, for the benefit of such of my hearers as may not 
have visited England, briefly to explain the character of 
the institution, which, though nearly identical with that 
of the University of Cambridge, differs essentially from 
that of the Universities in this country, and from that of 
most, if not all, the Universities on the Continent of Eu- 
rope — the possible exception being the Universities of 
Spain. The University of Oxford is a Federation of Col- 



THE UKIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 221 

leges. Each college is a separate institution for the pur- 
poses of instruction and discipline, has its own governing 
body, consisting of a Head (variously styled President, 
Principal, Warden, Provost, Master, and — in the case of 
Christchurch — Dean) and Fellows ; its own endowments, 
its own library, lecture-rooms, and dining-hall ; its own 
domestic chapel, where service is performed by its own 
chaplains. Each has also its own code of statutes, and 
the power, subject to those statutes, of making laws for 
itself The college instructors, called Tutors, are gener- 
ally chosen from the number of the Fellows, as are also 
the administrators of college discipline, called Deans or 
Censors. All the members of the colleges are members 
of the University, and subject to University government 
and laws. The University holds the public examinations 
and confers the degrees. It legislates, through its Coun- 
cil and Convocation, on what may be called Federal sub- 
jects, and administers Federal discipline through its Vice- 
chancellor and Proctors. In the matter of discipline 
there is, I believe, a speculative difference of opinion as 
to the Federal jurisdiction of the proctors within the col- 
lege gates ; but the bond of mutual interest between all 
the members of the Federation is too strong to allow this 
or any state-right question ever to threaten us with an 
academical civil war. There is also a University stafP of 
teachers in all the subjects of instruction, called the Pro- 
fessors, to whose lectures the students from all the col- 
leges resort, and whose duty it is to carry the instruction 
to a higher point than it can be carried by the college 
tutors, who are mostly younger men, not permanently 
devoted to a college life, but intending to take one of the 



222 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

many ecclesiastical benefices in the gift of the colleges, or 
to embrace, in course of time, some other active calling. 
The Federal element is embodied in the public buildings 
of the University — the Bodleian Library ; the Examina- 
tion Schools, which occupy the lower part of the same 
great Tudor quadrangle ; the Radcliffe Library, from the 
dome of which the best view of the city is obtained ; 
the Convocation House, in which University statutes are 
passed and University degrees conferred ; the Theatre, in 
which the memory of founders and benefactors is cele- 
brated at the gay ceremony of the Summer Commemora- 
tion, prize compositions recited, and honorary degrees be- 
stowed on distinguished visitors ; the University Muse- 
um ; the University Press ; and, above all, the University 
Church of St. Mary, which, with its beautiful spire, crowns 
the Academic City, and in which sermons are preached 
to the assembled University, after the hour of college 
chapel, from a pulpit not unfamed in the annals of relig- 
ious thought. 

The mainspring of the system, as regards education, 
lies in the University Examinations for the degree of 
Bachelor of Arts. At these examinations the majority 
of the students seek only to attain the standard required 
for an ordinary, or "pass" degree. The more aspiring be- 
come candidates for "honors," and obtain a place in the 
first, or one of the lower classes, according to their merits. 
The publication of these class-lists is, as might be expect- 
ed, the great event of University life, and it is not an in- 
significant event in the domestic and social life of En- 
gland. The training of those who read for high honors at 
Oxford or Cambridge is probably the severest that youth 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 223 

any where undergoes, and it is prolonged, generally speak- 
ing, to the age of twenty-two. The system of competition 
is not carried quite so high at Oxford as at Cambridge, 
where the candidates are not only divided into classes, but 
arranged in each class in their order of merit ; whereas at 
Oxford they are only divided into classes, and the names 
arranged alphabetically in each class. Whether such 
strong stimulants of youthful ambition, and such marked 
distinctions for youthful attainment would be necessary or 
desirable in a perfect state of things, is perhaps a doubtful 
question. But in English society as it is, the intellectual 
honors thus awarded by national authority are useful as 
a counterpoise, however imperfect, to the artificial distinc- 
tions of hereditary rank and wealth. Nor can it be de- 
nied that the class -lists have given England men in all 
departments, from theology to finance, whose high train- 
ing has lent loftiness to their own character and aspira- 
tions, and to the character and aspirations of their nation. 
The College Fellowships, which are bestowed by exam- 
ination, and to which stipends are attached, averaging 
about £200, or $1000, a year, form additional and more 
substantial prizes for exertion among the flower of our 
students, and it is in the competition for these that the 
highest intellectual efforts of all are probably made. Our 
almost exclusive subjects of instruction, till recently, were 
the classics, with ancient philosophy and ancient history, 
mathematics being recognized, and by some of our stu- 
dents carried to a high point, but not held in the same 
honor, though at Cambridge they were the dominant 
study. Eecently, by an academic revolution, something 
like that which substituted the classical for the scholastic 



224 THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFOKD. 

system in the sixteentli century, we have thrown open 
our doors to physical science, modern history, jurispru- 
dence, and political economy, to which honors are now 
awarded legally, equal to those conferred on classics, 
though classics still, practically, retain the foremost place. 
The degrees higher than that of Bachelor of Arts — that 
of Master of Arts, and those of Bachelor or Doctor of 
Theology, Civil Law, or Medicine — are rather marks of 
academical standing than rewards of intellectual exertion, 
though there is an examination for the degree in Civil 
Law, and one of a more effective character for the degree 
in Medicine. The degree of Doctor of Civil Law is con- 
ferred as an honorary mark of distinction on illustrious 
visitors of all kinds — generals, admirals, politicians, and 
diplomatists, as well as men of letters or science. Law 
and Medicine, of which the Universities were the schools 
in the Middle Ages, are now studied, the first in the 
chambers of London barristers, the second in the great 
London hospitals. Of Theology England has no regular 
school. The Universities, which were once places of pro- 
fessional as well as of general training in England, as they 
are still on the Continent, are now in England places of 
general training alone. They are the final schools of 
those among our English youth who can afford to give 
themselves the advantage, and pay to their country the 
tribute of a long liberal education. 

It is still a disputed question whether the Universities 
belong to the Established Church or to the nation. The 
Dissenters have recently been admitted by Parliament to 
the Bachelor's degree. An effort is now being made, 
which has occasioned a pretty sharp struggle in the 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFOED. 225 

House of Commons, to tlirow open to them the Master's 
degree, which would make them members of Convoca- 
tion, the governing body of the University. The Fellow- 
ships of colleges -are all confined to members of the Es- 
tablished Church. If England seems, in this and some 
other respects, now to lag behind other nations in the 
march of liberty, it is partly because at one time she had 
so much outstripped them all. 

The Colleges still retain something of their mediaeval 
and monastic character, though modern life and Protest- 
antism have, to a great extent, broken through the found- 
er's rule. The Fellows — such of them, at least, as are in 
residence — still live partly in common, dining together in 
the college hall, where they sit at the upper end, on a 
kind of dais, while the students sit at long tables down 
the hall, and retiring together after dinner to their " com- 
mon-room" (an institution unknown to our austere found- 
ers), to take dessert and wine, and talk over the subjects 
of the day. What is of more importance, they still for- 
feit their Fellowships on marriage ; whence, as was be- 
fore mentioned, few of them settle down permanently to 
college life, which, though pleasant for a time, becomes 
very dreary as a man grows old, and when all the com- 
panions of his youth are gone. The jealous gates of the 
old monastic quadrangles, however, which, according to 
the founders' statutes, were to admit jao female form more 
dangerous than that of an elderly laundress, have quite 
forgotten their ungracious duty, as a visitor to our sum- 
mer festival of Commemoration will easily see. 

One of the most striking objects in the High Street is 
a long, dark range of buildings, in a late Gothic style, 

K2 



226 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFOED. 

called University College — a name whicli increases to 
strangers the difficulty of understanding the relations be- 
tween the colleges and the University. This is the old- 
est of our existing foundations, and its reputed founder is 
King Alfred, whose e^gj appears in the hall and com- 
mon-room, beside those of Eldon, Stowell, and Windham, 
the later and more authentic worthies of the college. Its 
real founder, however, was unquestionably "William of 
Durham, a learned and munificent ecclesiastic of the thir- 
teenth century, who bequeathed a sum of money to the 
University for the support of students in theology, and 
whose theologians were afterward settled by the Univer- 
sity on the spot, though in a humbler house. There can 
be little doubt that Oxford, as one of the chief cities of 
Saxon England, was a place of education in the time and 
under the auspices of Alfred, whose birthplace, Wantage, 
was close by. But no authentic evidence definitely con- 
nects the great restorer of Anglo-Saxon learning and in- 
stitutions with the University or any of its foundations ; 
though, on the strength of spurious testimony, a court of 
law has actually recognized him as the Founder, and his 
successors on the throne of England as the Yisitors, of 
the college founded by the University out of the bequest 
of William of Durham. If he erected or revived any 
schools at Oxford, the scythe of the Norman conquest 
passed over them. ^^Yet William of Durham, if he were 
now alive, would scarcely be grieved to see that his 
foundation had become a monument to the memory of 
Alfred. 

We may more reasonably look to the monasteries of 
which there are remains at Oxford for the origin of the 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 227 

present University. Learning owes a tribute to the beau- 
tiful ruins of these houses wherever they are found, for 
on them first her ark rested when the waters of the bar- 
barian deluge were beginning to subside. In their clois- 
ters her expiring lamp was first revived ; from them its 
rays first shone out again over the dark waste. The 
Abbey of Bee, in Normandy, which sent forth Lanfranc, 
the precursor of the great civilians, and Anselm, the pre- 
cursor of the great schoolmen, was itself the germ of a 
University. 

Certain, however, it is that in the reigns of the Norman 
successors of William the Conqueror there was a Univer- 
sity at Oxford, and that in the reign of Henry III. there 
was a great University — one chronicler says a University 
with thirty thousand students. This is scarcely credible. 
But the mediaeval city swarmed and overflowed with ar- 
dent youths flocking to the sole source of knowledge and 
the great avenue of promotion. A bastion in the city 
walls was rented, as appears by the city records, for the 
habitation of students. The University was then not 
only a place of liberal education, but the school of the 
great professions, which, as we have said, have since mi- 
grated to the capital. The whole academical course at 
that period, up to the highest degree in any one of the 
Faculties, occupied sixteen years. There were also gram- 
mar-schools for boys, so that all ages were mingled to- 
gether — not only all ages, but natives of all countries. 
There was then not only an England, a France, a Ger- 
many , an Italy, a Spain, but a Christendom with one 
Church, one Pope, one Priesthood, one ecclesiastical law, 
one language for all educated men, and a group of com- 



228 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

mon Universities which were now appearing in the differ- 
ent lands of Europe, like stars coming out, one bj one, in 
the media3val night. Students went from one University 
to another, learning at each the special kind of knowl- 
edge for which each was famous. French youths came 
to the scholastic disputations of Oxford, and Oxford doc- 
tors taught in the schools of Paris. Perhaps the love of 
wandering, not yet quelled in the half-civilized heart, had 
something to do with the migrations of the student, as it 
had with the expeditions of the pilgrim. 

The studies were, first, "Arts," including all the sub- 
jects of general instruction known at the time ; and aft- 
erward Theology, Law, or Medicine. Law was the great 
study of those who desired to make their fortunes and to 
rise in the world. Its monks, who struggled hard to win 
the great places of learning for themselves and for the 
cause of which they were the champions, wished to re- 
lease students in Theology from the necessity of proceed- 
ing through "Arts." But the academic spirit seems to 
have prevailed, and to have enforced the previous course 
of general study as a preparation for the theologian ; a 
sound decision, if the theologian is to know man as well 
as God ; or, to put the case more truly, if to know God 
he must know man. The cardinal study, however, and 
the particular glory of Oxford, was the scholastic philos- 
ophy, a study condemned by Bacon, and in its superan- 
nuated decrepitude justly condemned, as bearing no fruit. 
If it bore no fruit, it at least, in the mind of the mediaeval 
student, bore the leaves and blossoms of most romantic 
hope. But we have ceased to regard it with contempt. 
We know that, in its hour, it played no mean part in 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 229 

training tlie intellect of msm. And if it bore no material 
fruits, it bore the moral fruit of a faith in the world of 
ideas, and a deep interest in the nnseen. It belongs to 
the spiritual, though chimerical age of monasticism, ca- 
thedrals, and crusades. Duns Scotus, the " Subtle Doc- 
tor," Alexander Hales, the ''Irrefragable Doctor," and 
Ockham, the great ISTominalist, were among the glories of 
scholastic Oxford; and they are glories the lustre of 
which is now dimmed, but, while science and humanity 
are grateful to him who serves them in his allotted place 
and time, will never die. Wicklifife himself was one of 
the greatest of the schoolmen. In the keen reasonings 
of the school philosophy he sharpened the controversial 
weapons with which he was to assail the errors and cor- 
ruptions of the Church. In its high dreams he formed 
his ideal theory of a Christian world. 

There is a name in the annals of mediaeval Oxford 
more famous in philosophy than any of these. The good 
taste of the last century pulled down, under a local im- 
provement act, an arch which spanned Folly Bridge, and 
contained a chamber hallowed by tradition as Friar Ba- 
con's study. There, according to the legend, the great 
and formidable Franciscan, the man of too much light for 
a dark age, the father and protomartyr of modern science, 
pursued studies which, in his case at least, had a practical 
and fruitful, as well as a metaphysical side. There, as 
wondering ignorance fancied, the mighty master of the 
Black Art, now called Science, and the study of the laws 
of God, held forbidden converse with the Brazen Head. 
And there, we may more easily believe, was compounded 
for the first time a black powder which possessed a mag- 



230 THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 

ical power indeed, and at the first explosion of wliicli the 
walls of the feudal castle fell to the ground. 

The teaching was of the professional kind, the oral lec- 
tures of the professor being, in that age, not a mere sup- 
plement to books, but the only great source of knowl- 
edge, the only way of publishing new ideas. The lec- 
tures were given, not in regular lecture-rooms, but in 
church porches, and wherever the lecturer could find 
space and shelter, while eager multitudes crowded to hear 
the great teacher of the day. Knowledge has since been 
drunk from purer springs, but never, perhaps, with a 
thirstier lip. The scholars also exercised their logical 
powers, and at once displayed their acquirements and 
gained a more thorough mastery over them by the prac- 
tice of disputations — the tournaments of the intellectual 
knight — with a Moderator as the umpire, to rule the lists 
and adjudge the prize. 

In modern times the University of Oxford, like every 
thing connected with the Anglican Church, has been Con- 
servative. She has, in fact, been the citadel of the Con- 
servative party. In the thirteenth century, her heroic 
age, her leaning, both in religion and politics, was to the 
Liberal side ; and she belonged not to the reactionary, but 
to the progressive element of the mediaeval Church and 
society — to that which prepared, not to that which strug- 
gled to avert, and afterward to cancel, the Eeformation. 
There was a sympathy for the doctrines of the Wal- 
denses ; there was a strong sympathy, at least among the 
younger students, for the doctrines of Wickliffe. The 
learned Bishop of Lincoln, Grossteste, the leading man of 
Oxford in the reign of Henry III., was the head of a par- 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 281 

ty in the Church and nation which protested against the 
encroachments and the corruptions of the court of Kome, 
and died anathematized bj the Pope, sainted as a patriot 
by the people. This party of independence in the Church 
was closely connected with the party of constitutional 
liberty in the states and Oxford, afterward the strong- 
hold of Charles I., was then the strong-hold of De Mont- 
fort. Not the hearts only of Oxford students were with 
the champions of liberty, but their arms ; and at the de- 
fense of Northampton they fought against the King un- 
der their own banner, and, according to the chronicles, 
fought well. From the spirit of Oxford, it has been truly 
said, if not from Oxford itself, emanated the famous poet- 
ic pamphlet in favor of constitutional government. 

" Nee omnis aretatio privat libertatem, 
Nee omnis districtio tollit potestatem. 
Ad quid vult libera lex reges arctari ? 
Ne possint adultera lege maculari. 

*'Et hac coarctatio non est servitutis; 
Sed est ampliatio regire virtutis. 
Igitur comrnunitas regni consulatur ; 
Et quid universitas sentiat sciatur. " 

Let the believers in liberty pray for us that we may have 
another heroic age. 

There were no colleges then. The students lived in 
hostels or halls, most of which were afterward absorbed 
by the spreading buildings of the colleges, under one of 
the Masters of Arts or Doctors of the University, select- 
ed as their tutor. They were divided into nations, or 
Northerners and Southerners, according to the part of 
the kingdom from which they came. I should say the 



282 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 

academical community in those days resembled rather a 
modern German University than the modern Oxford, if I 
had not before me the indignant words of a learned writ- 
er who protests against our comparing the academic ad- 
herents of Grrossteste andDe Montfort with "the bemud- 
dled Burschen, who vapored at the barricades of Berlin 
and Yienna;" and declares the Oxford scholars, in those 
golden days, were characterized as much by the spirit of 
duty, intelligence, and order, as the Burschen are by that 
of anarchy and absurdit}^ But order — in the material 
sense at least — was not invariably characteristic of the 
Oxford scholar. Our modern " Town and Gown rows" 
are the faint and attenuated relics of the desperate affrays 
which in the Middle Ages took place between the impet- 
uous students of the University and the strong-handed 
burghers of the feudal town. A penitential procession, 
which the citizens were compelled annually to perform, 
long kept alive the memory of one of the bloodiest of 
these encounters. There were fights also, and sanguina- 
ry fights, between the students and the Jews, who had 
not failed to come in considerable force to a University 
for the practice of usury, or to draw upon themselves 
the hatred of their debtors — farther inflamed and sancti- 
fied in its own eyes by fanatical antipathy to the misbe- 
liever. The tragic memory of a great massacre attaches 
to a spot called the Seven Deadly Sins, the site of the 
Old Jewry, now occupied by New Inn Hall. Sometimes, 
again, there were conflicts between the two "Nations" 
far more serious than those between the clubs in a mod- 
ern German University ; and on one occasion they drew 
out in the fields near the town, and fought a pitched bat- 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 233 

tie with bows and arrows. Papal Legates were never 
welcome visitors among the English, who always, in their 
most Catholic times, had a something of Protestantism 
and a good deal of Teutonic independence in their hearts ; 
and the Lord Legate Otho, in the thirteenth century, 
having visited Oxford in the course of his mission, was 
— in consequence of a quarrel between his cook and one 
of the hungry scholars, who had been drawn by the 
steam of a legate's dinner to the kitchen — set upon by 
the academic populace, and with great difficulty escaped 
with his life. The royal authority in those feudal times 
was fitfully interposed to punish tumults rather than pre- 
serve order. That concourse of students, of all ranks 
and nations, not a few of them mendicants, was no doubt 
an active-minded, ill-governed, inflammable mass — the 
quintessence of the intellect, but also of the turbulence 
of their time. 

The first college, and the prototype of all the rest, both 
at Oxford and Cambridge, was founded by Walter de 
Merton, Chancellor of England under Henry IIL and Ed- 
ward L, who deserves the honor due to a man of genius, 
if it be a proof of genius to bid a new institution live. 
It stands on the south of the city, close to Christchurch 
meadow, with a chapel, or rather church, and tower, 
famed as examples of the best Gothic style, with three 
quadrangles of different epochs, a front toward the mead- 
ow like a great Tudor mansion, and a pleasant garden 
with a grove of limes. The little dark quadrangle, called 
— nobody knows why — " Mob Quad," is the oldest part 
of the pile, and the cradle of college life. Merton had 
before him the different elements of his idea — the mon- 



234 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFOED. 

asteries, with their strict discipline ; the halls or hostels 
of students, with their secular studies; the stipends or 
exhibitions which the wealthy friends of learning were 
in the habit of giving to needy scholars, but which ended 
with the life of the giver. He adopted the architectural 
form and something of the strict rule of a monastery, but 
without the asceticism or the vows, devoting his house 
to prayer as well as to study, and attaching to it a chapel 
for the performance of religious services, but making 
study the distinctive object. His design was expressed 
in his code of statutes, which were to a great extent 
copied by subsequent founders. According to these, the 
Scholars (now the Fellows) of Merton College were to 
be of good character, chaste, peaceful, humble, indigent 
and in need of assistance, apt for study, and desirous of 
making progress in it. Their qualifications were to be 
tested by a probationary novitiate of one year. The 
Fellowship was to be forfeited by neglect of study, or by 
the acquisition of such a benefice in the Church as would 
render the Fellow no longer in need of assistance. The 
Fellows were to reside constantly in college, and regu- 
larly to attend the schools of the University. They were 
first to study " the liberal arts and philosophy;" then to 
pass on to theology, except four or five, who might study 
canon law. One of them also was to be a grammarian 
— for the benefit, probably, of the children of the found- 
er's kin, who were to be brought up in the house. The 
rule of study was simply that of the schools of the Uni- 
versity. The rule of life prescribed common meals, at 
which the Fellows were to sit in silence, after the monas- 
tic fashion, and listen to the reader ; uniform dress ; the 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 235 

use of the Latin tongue ; strict obedience ; surveillance 
of tlie juniors by the seniors; and periodical inquiries, 
like those made at the monastic chapters, into the char- 
acter and conduct of all the members of the society. At- 
tendance at the canonical hours and the celebration of 
masses was enjoined on all, and, for this purpose, those 
of the society were required to be in priest's orders. 
Masses were said in this, as in all mediseval foundations, 
for the founder's soul. The college was to be governed 
by a Warden — "a man circumspect in spiritual and in 
temporal affairs." There were also to be subordinate of- 
ficers for discipline, and for managing the estates and 
keeping the accounts ; and every year, after harvest, the 
Warden was to make his progress through the estates, 
and to report to the society on his return. The annual 
stipend of each Fellow was to be fifty shillings, subject 
to mulcts for absence from the schools. The Warden 
was to have fifty merks for his table and two horses for 
his progress. The number of Fellows was to increase 
with the estate, and this increase none, under pain of their 
founder's high displeasure, were to oppose, saving in very 
urgent cases, such as a heavy debt, a suit with a power- 
ful adversary (when, in those days, gold would have been 
too needful to obtain justice), losses by fire, a murrain 
among the flocks, general collections for poor students, 
the ransom of the prince or a prelate, a public contribu- 
tion for the defense of the Holy Land. Each Fellow at 
his election was to take an oath to obey the statutes ; and 
though power is given to the society to make new rules, 
no power is given to alter those of the founder. 

The last regulation proved very fatal in after times to 



236 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

the welfare of Merton's foundation, and to that of the 
other foundations which were modeled after the pattern 
of his, because it kept them stationary while all around 
was moving — unchanging while all around was changed. 
But it evinces no special illiberality or tyrannical tend- 
ency on the part of its good author. The men of his 
generation, the men of many generations after his, hav- 
ing no extensive knowledge of history, would have no 
conception of the great onward movement of humanity 
which the study of history, ranging over long periods of 
time and including great revolutions, has revealed, and 
which would convict of an arrogance bordering on in- 
sanity the man who should, in these times, presume to 
bind his own ideas on any community as an inviolable 
and immutable law. To them all seemed fixed and un- 
changing as the solid earth, of the revolutions of which 
they were as little conscious as they were of the progress 
of the political, social, and intellectual world. They paint- 
ed the apostles in the dress of their own age, and thought 
that men would wear the same dress till the end of time. 
They had no idea that fifty shillings a year would ever 
cease to be a comfortable income for a Scholar ; or that 
a Warden, in making his annual progress round the es- 
tates of his college, would ever be able to travel more 
rapidly and conveniently than on horseback. And in 
truth, if they had thought that the poetry and enjoyment 
of traveling would never be greater than it was in those 
annual rides in the summer time through woods and 
over hills, by castle, and abbey, and feudal town, not from 
hotel to hotel, but from one country grange to another, 
their error would not have been great. Merton allows 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFOED. 237 

his Warden and Fellows to make new rules as occasion 
might require, in addition to those he gave them, and in 
this he shows himself a liberal legislator for his day. ^ He 
was scarcely in his grave, however, before his inability, 
as a mortal, to mould his fellow-men exactly according 
to his will became apparent in deviations from his rule ; 
and we have the Visitor of his college. Archbishop Peck- 
ham, fulminating against the admission of interdicted 
studies, the neglect of the rule of indigence, and other 
violations and perversions of the founder's law. 

The necessity of respecting individual freedom was as 
little understood in the Middle Ages as that of making 
provisions for reasonable changes in institutions. Men 
saw no evil in absolutely surrendering their individuali- 
ty into the hands of a founder, whether he were the 
founder of a monastic order such as St. Dominic or St. 
Francis, or the founder of a college such as Merton. As 
little did a founder see any evil in accepting and enforc- 
ing the surrender. And in those simple times of faith 
and devotion both parties erred in ignorance, and there- 
fore in comparative innocence. But the error of both 
grew more conscious and less innocent when Loyola de- 
liberately set himself to turn his followers not only into 
intellectual slaves, but into "living corpses," and when 
his followers renounced the freedom to which they had 
been called to become the instruments of his design. 

Merton College was ecclesiastical, as all literary insti- 
tutions and learned men were in the Middle Ages, when, 
in fact, society was divided into the soldier, the priest, 
the burgher, and the serf. But it belonged to the secu- 
lar, not to the regular clergy. No monk was to be ad- 



238 THE UNIYEESITY OF OXFOKD. 

mitted among the Fellows ; and in case the Visitor 
should exercise his office by deputy, the deputy was not 
to be a monk — provisions which seem to denote that the 
founder's leaning was to the party of nationality and in- 
dependence, not to the Papal party, of which the monk- 
ish orders were the most zealous and effective supporters. 
And, in truth, the sons of Dominic hardly succeeded in 
gaining a firm ascendency over the native independence 
of the Anglo-Saxon mind. England was never in the 
dominions of the Inquisition. 

The enactment that the Fellows of Merton should all 
be indigent had, no doubt, as its primary object, the ful- 
fillment of the founder's charitable intentions toward 
poor students. But the men of those times also enter- 
tained an ascetic preference for poverty as the higher 
spiritual state — an error, as we all know, if the doctrine 
be applied to the wages of honest labor, and not merely 
to those who live in idleness and luxury by the sweat of 
another's brow, yet an error more respectable than the 
worship of wealth, and in this respect to be classed with 
the other chimerical but not ignoble fancies of the time. 
Poor men were also the most likely to render perfect 
obedience, for the sake of their founder's bread, to all 
the requirements of his rule. Nor was there any lack 
of indigence in mediseval Oxford. Many of the youths 
who had found their way from the bonds and darkness 
of feudalism to the light, freedom, and hope of the Uni- 
versity were, as was before said, actual mendicants. They 
were in the habit of receiving regular licenses from the 
Vice-Chancellor to beg. 

Our picture of a mediaeval college would hardly be 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 239 

complete without the servants — the manciple, cook, but- 
ler, barber, and porter, and the groom who kept the horses 
for the annual progress. There were in some colleges 
regular members of the foundation, with " commons" or 
allowances like the Head and Fellows. Chaucer has de- 
scribed the manciple of a temple (that is, a college of law- 
yers in London), and the description will serve equally 
well for the manciple of a college at Oxford. Domestic 
service then was not a commercial contract, but a sort of 
personal allegiance, like the fealty of a vassal to his lord, 
and probably, as a general rule, it lasted through life. It 
now seems, in America at least, to have almost reached 
its last stage of existence. 

I have cited Chaucer. He has given, in the Prologue 
to the Canterbury Tales, a picture (not the least admira- 
ble in that gallery of social portraits) of an Oxford stu- 
dent of this, or of a rather later period, which will no 
doubt represent to us sufficiently well the inmates of the 
House of Merton : 

"A clerk there was of Oxenforde also, 
That unto logike hadde long ygo. 
As lene was his hors as is a rake, 
And he was not right fat I undertake ; 
But loked holwe and thereto soberly. 
Ful thredbare was his overest courtepy, 
For he hadde geten him yet no benefice, 
Ne was nought worldly to have an office. 
For him was lever han at his beddes hed 
A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red. 
Of Aristotle and his philosophic. 
Than robes rich, or fidel, or sautrie. 
But all be that he was a philosophre, 
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre ; 



24:0 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

But all that he might of his frendes hente, 
On bokes and on lerning he it spente ; 
And besily gan for the soules praie 
Of him th^t yave him %Yherewith to scolaie. 
Of studie took he moste cure and hede ; 
Not a word spake he more than was nede ; 
And that was said in forme and reverence, 
And short and quike and ful of high sentence. 
Souning in moral vertue was his speche, 
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. " 

If this description is as true as it is genial and vivid, 
" Oxenforde" bad no reason to be asbamed of ber "clerks." 
Tbougb tbeir pbilosopby produced no gold, tbej must 
have been very far from an ignoble or worthless element 
in tbe nation. 

Sucb was tbe most ancient of tbese communities, tbe 
thread of whose corporate lives has run through so many 
centuries, and survived so many revolutions ; in whose 
domestic archives are recorded tbe daily habits and ex- 
penses of so many successive generations. Would that 
they had left a record of tbeir thoughts and feelings too, 
or even of the events that passed before tbeir eyes ! 

If you come to Merton, or to any of tbe colleges of 
which it was the type, in tbe present day, you will see 
tbe old buildings and feel tbeir influence, but you will 
trace only the faint and fading remains of the original in- 
stitution. You will find tbe Fellows still dining togeth- 
er, and still unmarried ; but you will have no reader at 
meals, nor will the meal be silent, nor will tbe speech be 
in the Latin tongue. What is of more importance, tbe 
scholars of Merton, who have assumed tbe common name 
of Fellows, instead of being students in the schools of tbe 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 241 

University, have themselves become teachers, engaged in 
the tuition of the students who fill the extended build- 
ings of the college. This is a change which has taken 
place in the colleges generally since the date of their 
foundation, though in some, especially those of later date, 
the rudiments of the system of college tuition are discern- 
ible in the original statutes. Junior members have gen- 
erally been added to the foundation, if they were not 
originally a part of it, who receive stipends from the col- 
lege, and wear a special gown to distinguish them as 
foundationers, but are not members of the governing 
body. To these the name of Scholars is now appropria- 
ted, though in the earlier colleges it was given to those 
who are now the Fellows. Such of the Fellows as are 
still students study in London, in the precincts of the law 
or in the great schools of medicine. 

Baliol is of earlier date than Merton as a foundation, 
but it was not till a later period, and probably in imita- 
tion of Merton, that it took the shape of a regular college. 
John Baliol — the father of that Baliol who was King of 
Scotland for a day — besought his wife Dervorguilla, on 
his death-bed, to continue the charitable assistance which 
he had given to poor Oxford scholars during his life. 
The " noble and virtuous lady," in fulfillment of this re- 
quest, bought a house in Oxford, and placed her husband's 
scholars in it. She gave them a short and sensible code 
of statutes, enjoining them to attend divine service on 
festivals, and on other days to frequent the schools of the 
University ; to pray for her husband's soul ; and to ob- 
serve some simple rules of life. A young scholar, or serv- 
itor, was to be fed with the broken meat from their table. 

L 



242 THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFOED. 

As the foundation of a Baliol, the college is a monument 
of the close connection which existed between the En- 
glish and Scotch nobility, and of the tendency which the 
two nations showed to unite with each other, till the wars 
of Edward I. put deadly enmity between them, and de- 
layed their union for four centuries. In its outward ap- 
pearance, Baliol, in spite of its new buildings, the offspring 
of the revived Gothic taste, is perhaps the least attractive 
of all the colleges ; but for many years past it has been 
the most distinguished in intellect, and the foremost in 
the race for University honors. Let no one, looking on 
its ugliness, conclude that beauty is unfavorable to learn- 
ing. The talisman of its intellectual greatness has not 
been ugliness, but freedom. Dervorguilla was led by her 
good sense, or by some happy accident (let us hope by 
her good sense), to leave the members of her college great 
liberty in elections to Fellowships — not fettering them, as 
most of the founders did, with preferences to the natives 
of favored counties or of founder's kin. They were thus 
enabled to select and reward merit, to secure the most 
distinguished names for their societ}^, and the best teach- 
ers for their students, and to place a poor and originally 
very humble college at the head of the whole University. 
Exeter College and Oriel College are memorials of the 
unhappy times of Edward II. The founder of Oriel Col- 
lege, Adam de Brome, a chaplain of the unfortunate king, 
felt that he had fallen on evil days ; for in the opening 
of his statutes he concludes a long jeremiade on the cor- 
ruptions and miseries of the age with the dismal declara- 
tion that all visible things are visibly tending to annihila- 
tion (qua3 visibilem habent essentiam tendunt visibiliter 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 243 

acl non esse). Evil days they were indeed — the days of 
a weak king, when weakness in a king was criminal ; of 
civil discord, of disastrous and humiliating war, of famine 
and misery that loosened the very bonds of society. And 
it was something that, with all this around them, men 
could still live in the world of intellect, and, with a hope- 
ful though a sorrowful hand, cast bread on the waters, to 
be found in a happier hour. Walter de Stapyldon, Bish- 
op of Exeter, the founder of Exeter College, perished in 
an insurrection of the populace of London on the eve of 
his master's fall. The elections to the Fellowships at Ori- 
el College, like those at Baliol, were left comparatively 
open, and with the same result. Among the illustrious 
men numbered among the Fellows in recent times were 
Arnold, Whately, and — perhaps more famous than either 
— J. H. ISTewman, whose genius organized and led the 
great Eomanizing reaction in the Church of England, 
which ought to bear his name rather than that of his 
friend and coadjutor. Dr. Pusey. 

The great Palladian building opposite to University 
College, in High Street, was substituted by the classiciz- 
ing taste of the last century for the ancient buildings of 
Queen's College. This college was founded by Eggles- 
field, chaplain to Philippa, the Queen of Edward III, and 
was commended to the patronage of all queens consort 
by the founder, who could himself only give "a widow's 
mite" toward the accomplishment of his design. The per- 
mission to speak French as well as Latin, and the injunc- 
tion to cultivate courtly manners, betoken Egglesfield's 
acquaintance, as a royal chaplain, with the court — one of 
the gayest and most gallant courts, the most full of spirit 



244 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 

and life, perhaps, that ever met in halls devoted to the 
" dull pomp of kings." Egglesfield was also full of mys- 
tical fancies and extravagant symbolism. The members 
of his college were to be thirteen, answering to the num- 
ber of Christ and the apostles ; they were to sit at dinner 
as he imagined Christ and the apostles had sat at the Last 
Supper ; they were to wash the feet of thirteen poor men 
once every year; they were to maintain seventy poor 
boys, in honor of the seventy disciples ; they were to 
have in their chapel a candelabrum with seven branches, 
to typify the seven gifts of the Spirit, and worst the sev- 
en devils. A symbolical needle is still presented to each 
of the Fellows at the annual college festival with the 
words, " Take this and be thrifty," to recall an absurd ety- 
mology (Aiguille) of the founder's name ; and from some 
fancy, perhaps equally childish, the college is still sum- 
moned to dinner by the sound of a horn. Such puerili- 
ties mingled with the highest designs of these men ; so 
true it is that in their grandest works they were "like 
noble boys at play." It is a cherished but a baseless tra- 
dition that, within the walls of the college founded by his 
mother's chaplain, was educated the heroic boy whose 
first feat of arms was performed at Crecy ; who led En- 
gland at Poictiers ; and whose name, if we could honest- 
ly claim it, would be dear to us, less because he was the 
first soldier, than because, with all his faults, and all the 
stains on his bright career, he was the first gentleman of 
his age. Queen's College has a somewhat better preten- 
sion to the honor of having educated the victor of Agin- 
court, who is said to have resided here under the tuition 
of his uncle, Cardinal Beaufort. 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 245 

And now a crisis arrived in the history of the Univer- 
sity. Whether it was from the troubles consequent on 
the preaching of Wickliffe, or from any other cause, the 
numbers of the students fell off, and the schools were be- 
coming deserted, when a friend appeared to restore the 
prosperity of Oxford by a new and more magnificent 
foundation. 

New College is four centuries and a half old. Once it 
was not only new, but a novelty, and the wonder of its 
age. This college, and the great school at "Winchester at- 
tached to it, were the splendid and memorable work of 
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, who, com- 
bining, after the manner of those days, the statesman with 
the churchman, was the chancellor, the favorite minister, 
and the chief diplomatist of Edward III. Loaded with 
preferment, even to an excess of pluralism, by the favor 
of his sovereign, he used his accumulated wealth with the 
munificence which Bacon, childless himself, complacently 
notes as characteristic of childless men. The founder of 
ISTew College had originally risen in life and attracted the 
king's notice by his skill as an architect — a calling not 
incompatible with the clerical character in an age when 
the clergy embraced all who wrought not with the hand, 
but with the brain. He had built Windsor Castle ; and 
in founding his own colleges, no doubt he gratified the 
tastes of the architect as well as those of the friend of re- 
ligion and learning. The chapel, the hall, the cloisters, 
the tower, the great quadrangle, still bespeak his genius ; 
though the great quadrangle has been somewhat marred 
by the tastelessness of a later age, which has also added 
another quadrangle, in wretched imitation, it is believed, 



246 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

of some part of Yersailles. Beyond, you pass into a gar- 
den remarkable for its fine masses of varied foliage and 
its vignette view of Magdalen Tower, Skirting the col- 
lege and garden is the ancient city wall, here in its most 
perfect state, and most completely recalling the image of 
the old feudal town. The style of the college is the ear- 
liest perpendicular, marking the entrance of Gothic archi- 
tecture into the last of its successive phases of beauty, and 
at the same time the entrance of Mediaeval Catholicism 
and the feudal system upon the period of their decline. 
The special studies prescribed by the founder, which are 
of a classical character, also mark the dawn of the Kenais- 
sance in England some time after its light had begun to 
fill the sky in the land of Petrarch. This was the age of 
Gower and Chaucer, the natal hour of modern English 
literature. With the revival of learning was destined to 
come a great revolution in the religious sphere. But to 
this part of the movement Wykeham was no friend. In 
ecclesiastical matters he was a Conservative. He had 
come into collision with the early Eeformation, and with 
the precursor of Luther in the person of Wickliffe. He 
dedicated his two colleges to the Virgin, of whom he was 
a special devotee, and whose image stands conspicuous in 
more than one part of the quadrangle. He went beyond 
the previous founders in making peculiar and sumptuous 
provision for the performance of the Catholic ritual, with 
its stoled processions and tapered rites, and in enjoining 
religious observances and devotions on the members of 
his college. New College is still distinguished not only 
by the size and beauty of its chapel, but by its excellent 
choral service. Like many a Catholic patron and pro- 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 247 

moter of learning in the epoch preceding the Eeformation 
— like Wolsey, like Sir Thomas More, like Leo X. — 
Wykeham, in fostering classical literature and intellectual 
progress, unconsciously forwarded the destruction of all 
that was most dear to him. He warmed into life the ser- 
pent (so he would have thought it) that was to sting his 
own Church to death. 

New College had altogether more the character of an 
Abbey than the previous foundations. Its warden lived 
with more of the state of an abbot than the warden of 
Merton and the other colleges of that type. Its statutes 
prescribed a more monastic rule of life than previous 
codes. They regulated more narrowly, not to say more 
tyrannically, the details of personal conduct, and provided 
for more of mutual surveillance and denunciation. They 
forbid any student to go beyond the gates any where, ex- 
cept to the schools of the University, without a compan- 
ion to keep watch over him. They betray an increased 
desire to force individual character into a prescribed 
mould. We may gather from their enactments that in 
those days, as in these, the student was sometimes led 
astray from the path of learning and asceticism by the 
sports and allurements of an evil world ; for they strictly 
enjoin abstinence from gambling, hunting, and hawking. 
Each member of the college is sworn to observe them by 
oaths which, by their almost portentous rigor and prolix- 
ity, seem to betray the advent of an age when, the relig- 
ious faith of the world having given way, morality had 
given way with it, and man could no longer put trust in 
man. 

The University, as has been said, appears to have been 



248 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

in a languishing state wlien New College was founded. 
Wykeham obtained for his students the peculiar privilege 
of being examined for their degrees by the College in- 
stead of the University, whereby he meant to raise them 
to a higher pitch of industry, though the privilege proved, 
in after times, a charter of idleness. He also provided 
for instruction by college tutors within the walls. 

In these respects his college was peculiar. It was still 
more peculiar in its connection with the famous school 
which, standing beneath the shadow of Winchester Ca- 
thedral, casts over boyhood the spell of reverend antiqui- 
ty. Winchester was the first of our English public 
schools, and the archetype of our public school system : 
a system somewhat severe, taking the boy, almost the 
child, from his home, and throwing him before his hour 
into a world almost as hard as that with which the man 
will have to struggle ; but the parent, no doubt, of some 
Roman virtues, and the mistress, in part, of our imperial 
greatness. 

It is probable that the troubles which interfered with 
the prosperity of the University had been connected with 
the rise of Wicklifiism. The arch-heretic was himself 
the foremost of Oxford teachers and the leader of the ar- 
dent intellect of Oxford, as well as of its high spiritual 
aspirations. It was with great difficulty, and after re- 
peated struggles, that the Church authorities succeeded in 
purifying, if ever they did succeed in purifying, the Uni- 
versity of this plague ; and our first religious test was di- 
rected against this, the earliest form of the Protestant re- 
ligion. Among those who had caught the infection was 
Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College, a venerable and 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 249 

somewliat sombre pile close to Exeter. Afterward he 
grew orthodox, was made a bishop, and, becoming a dead- 
ly enemy of the party which he had deserted, founded a 
theological college specially to combat "that new and 
pestilent sect, which assailed all the sacraments and all 
the possessions of the Church." These words are not a 
bad summary of Wickliffism, a movement directed at once 
against the worldly wealth of the Establishment and the 
sacramental and ceremonial system, which failed any lon- 
ger to satisfy the religious heart. Whether Bishop Flem- 
ing's college contributed much toward the suppression 
of Protestant heresy in those days we do not know. In 
the last century it produced a group of students of a se- 
rious turn, diligent in religious studies and exercises, and 
on that account the laughing-stock of their fellow-students 
in a skeptical and scoffing age, at the head of whom was 
the modern counterpart of Wickliffe — John Wesley. 

Facing one way on High Street, the other on the Ead- 
clyffe Square, with a fine Gothic front, two quadrangles, 
and a pair of high towers in debased Gothic style, but 
very picturesque, stands All Souls' College. Over the 
gateway in High Street are sculptured the souls for whose 
relief from Purgatory the college was partly founded. 
Chichele, its founder, was Archbishop of Canterbury and 
Chancellor of Henry V. Parliament already at that time 
was moving the Crown to secularize church property and 
apply it to the defense of the realm. Shakspeare has im- 
mortalized the statement of the chroniclers that Arch- 
bishop Chichele urged his master to claim the crown of 
France in order to divert him from attending to these 
proposals. Some confirmation of this belief may perhaps 

L2 



250 THE UNIVERSITY OP OXFORD. 

be found in tlie statutes of Chicliele's college, which com- 
mand its members, as a duty more incumbent on them 
even than that of learning, to pray for the souls of King 
Henry V. and such of his companions in arms as " drank 
the bitter cup of death" in the fields of that glorious but 
unjust, and therefore, in its ultimate issue, disastrous war. 
In after times, through some unexplained train of acci- 
dents, the college became appropriated to men of high 
family, and the claims of aristocratic connection are still 
struggling with those of merit for the possession of the 
institution. 

Chichele had been educated at New College, the stat- 
utes of which he to a great extent copied. Another son 
of the same house, who also copied its statutes, was Wil- 
liam of Waynflete, Chancellor of Henry YL, and founder 
of Magdalen College, which stands beside the Eiver Cher- 
well, amidst its smooth expanses of lawn and under its 
immemorial trees, the loveliest of all the homes of learn- 
ing, the richest in all that is dear to a student's heart. 
Let one whose youth was passed in that fair house pay 
his tribute of gratitude and reverence to his founder's 
shade. In this work, we may believe, the spirit of a 
statesman-prelate, tossed on the waves of civil war, found 
relief from the troubles of an unquiet time. Under that 
gateway, when the tracery, now touched by age, was fresh, 
and the stone, now gray, was white, passed Eichard III., 
with his crime in his heart. The shadow of his dark 
presence is in the rooms of state over the gateway, which 
have just been restored by the college to their pristine 
magnificence. But pass on, under the cloisters, through 
the quadrangle, with its tranquil beauty, its level floor of 



THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFOED. 251 

green, and its quaint symbolic figures, and you will come 
to the walk consecrated by the gentle genius of Addi- 
son. 

The quadrangle, chapel, and hall are the work of the 
founder. But the tower, which lends grace to every view 
of Oxford, is believed to be a monument of the taste and 
of the soaring genius of Wolsey, who was a Fellow of the 
college, and the occurrence of whose name is ominous of 
coming change. 

The next foundation, following hard upon Magdalen, 
is Brasenose, a mass of buildings close under the Ead- 
clyffe Library — dark, as much from the discoloring of the 
stone as from years. As the night of the Middle Ages 
passed away, and the sun of the Eenaissance climbed the 
sky, more colleges and fewer monasteries were founded. 
Yet the bishop and the pious knight who jointly found- 
ed Brasenose had no misgiving as to the perpetual con- 
tinuance of Eoman Catholic devotions. They did not 
imagine that a day would come, and that soon, when it 
would be no longer a duty to attend daily mass, to repeat 
the Miserere and the Sancta Marie Mater^ to say the Pater- 
noster five times a day in honor of the five wounds of 
Christ, and the Angelical Salutation as many times in 
honor of the five joys of the Virgin. Yet the patent of 
their foundation is dated in the third year of Henry 
YIII. 

Pent between Merton and Christchurch — a confine- 
ment from which its growing greatness may one day 
tempt it to escape by migration — is Corpus Christi Col- 
lege. The quadrangle, with its quaint sun-dial, stands as 
it was left by the founder, Fox, Bishop of Winchester, a 



252 THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFOED. 

statesman and diplomatist, trusted in the crafty councils 
of Henry YIL We are now in full Kenaissance, and on 
tlie brink of the Keformation. The name of the college, 
denoting a strong belief in transubstantiation, and the de- 
votions prescribed in the statutes, show that the founder 
was (as the holder of the rich see of Winchester might 
be expected to be) an adherent of the established fliith. 
He had first intended to found a monastery. But his 
far-sighted friend. Bishop Oldham, said, ''What ! my lord, 
shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a com- 
pany of bussing [praying] monks, whose end and fall we 
may ourselves live to see ? No, no ; it is more meet that 
we should provide for the increase of learning, and for 
such as by their learning may do good to the Church and 
commonwealth." To the Eenaissance, however. Fox's 
college emphatically belongs. For the first time the 
classical authors are distinctly prescribed as studies, and 
a long and liberal list of them is given in the statutes. 
Latin composition, both in prose and verse, is enjoined ; 
and even on holidays and in vacation the students are 
required to practice themselves in writing verses and 
letters, in the rules of eloquence, the poets, orators, and 
historians. Greek as well as Latin was to be spoken by 
the students in the college hall — an enactment which be- 
speaks the intoxicating enthusiasm excited by the revi- 
val of learning. The foundation embraced two classic- 
al lecturers for the whole University, and Greece and 
Southern Italy are especially mentioned as countries from 
which the lecturers are to be taken. The language of 
the statutes themselves affects classical elegance, and the 
framer apologizes for not being perfectly Ciceronian. 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 253 

Erasmus, who had visited the college, said that it would 
b,e to Britain what the Mausoleum was to Caria, what the 
Colossus was to Ehodes. This it has hardly been, but it 
has produced eminent men ; and here Arnold practiced 
in youthful, almost boyish, debate the weapons which he 
was afterward to wield for truth and justice on an ampler 
field. 

Pulpit eloquence as well as classical learning was now 
in vogue, and the Fellows of Corpus Christi College are 
required, when of a certain standing, to preach in popu- 
lous cities, and at last, as the crowning test of their pow- 
ers, at St. Paul's Cross. To preach at St. Paul's Cross 
went, among other Fellows of the College, Eichard Hook- 
er, and those who have read his life can tell with how lu- 
dicrous and calamitous a result. 

The hour of Media3val Catholicism was now come ; 
but its grandest foundation at Oxford was its last. The 
stately fagade, the ample quadrangle, the noble hall of 
Christchurch are monuments, as every reader of Shak- 
speare knows, of the magnificence of Cardinal Wolsey, a 
true Prince of the Church, with a princely, if not with a 
pure heart. Here we stand on the point of transition be- 
tween Catholic and Protestant Eugland. Wolsey was in 
every sense an English Leo X. ; an indifferentist, proba- 
bly, in religion, as well as loose in morals, till misfortune 
and the approach of death made him again turn to Grod ; 
an enthusiast only in learning ; one of a group of men 
who, by fostering the new studies, promoted — without 
being aware of it — the progress of the new faith, and 
built with their own hands the funeral pile of their own 
Church. He suppressed a number of small monasteries 



254 THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFORD. 

to found ChristcTiurcli ; and no doubt he felt for the 
monks — with their trumpery^ their gross legends, and 
their fabricated relics — the same contempt which was 
felt for them by Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, and all 
other educated and enlightened men of the time. But 
he started back, and was troubled in mind when he found 
that the eminent teachers whom he had sought out with 
great pains for his new college were teachers of other 
novelties besides the classics. 

Grand as it is, Christchurch is not what Wolsey in- 
tended it to be. Had his design been fulfilled, it would 
have been " Oxford" indeed, and the University would 
have been almost swallowed up in ''Cardinal College," 
the name which, with a spirit of self-glorification some- 
what characteristic of him, he intended to give his found- 
ation. But in the midst of his work he fell ; and the 
king, whom he had served too well, took his wealth and 
usurped his place as the legal founder of Christchurch, 
though he has not been able to usurp his place in history 
or in the real allegiance of Christchurch men. The col- 
lege, however, though shorn of part of its splendor, was 
still splendid. In after times it became — in a social and 
political sense at least — the first in England, and the por- 
traits which line its hall are a gallery of English worthies 
in church and state. 

And now over Oxford, as well as over the rest of En- 
gland — and more fiercely, perhaps, than over any other 
city of England — swept the great storm of the Eeforma- 
tion. The current of religious thought which, left to it- 
self, would have flowed in a peaceful and beneficent 
stream, restrained by the barriers of a political church, 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 255 

at last burst upon society with the accumulated fury of 
a pent-up torrent. The monasteries, in Oxford as else- 
where, fell by a cruel though a righteous doom ; their 
beauty was laid desolate. For a moment the colleges 
were in danger. Our charters were taken from us, and 
the hungry courtiers, fleshed with the plunder of the 
monasteries, marked us for their prey. But Henry YIII. 
was learned, and a friend of learning : after a short hesi- 
tation he drove off the pack of ravening hounds, and the 
charters were given back into our trembling hands. But 
every thing monastic was rigorously suppressed. The 
great bell of Christchurch, which Milton heard from his 
neighboring house at Forest Hill, "swinging slow with 
sullen roar," was saved from the wreck of Ouseney Ab- 
bey, the chief monastery of the city. 

The revolution was almost as great in the intellectual 
as in the ecclesiastical sphere. The books of the great 
school philosophers and divines — of Aquinas, Duns Sco- 
tus, the Master of the Sentences — were torn up and scat- 
tered about the college quadrangles. They had been the 
"angelic," the "subtle," the "irrefragable" doctors of 
their day. 

To and fro swept the tide of controversy and persecu- 
tion from the beginning of the Eeformation under Hen- 
ry YIII. to the final settlement under Elizabeth. Now 
Catholics were expelled from their colleges by Edward 
YI., now Protestants by Mary, and again Catholics by 
Elizabeth. In Broad Street, opposite Baliol College, a 
site once occupied by the city ditch, is a spot marked by 
a flat cross of stone. There Cranmer, Latimer, and Eid- 
ley died. In the city wall, close by, was their prison- 



256 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

house. While the Protestant divines, Bucer and Fagius, 
reigned in Oxford, the wife of Fagius was buried near 
the shrine of St. Frideswide, in Christchurch Cathedral. 
The Catholics, in their hour of triumph, flung out the ac- 
cursed wife of the heretic from the holy ground. The 
Protestants, in their turn victorious, mingled her bones 
with those of the saint, and the dust of the two remains 
forever blended together by the irony of fate. 

Two colleges, Trinity and St. John's, were founded dur- 
ing the brief Catholic reaction under Philip and Mary. 
As celibate institutions, colleges, though less distinctively 
Catholic than monasteries, were still more congenial to 
Catholicism than to Protestantism, and it was natural 
that the fashion of founding them should revive with 
Catholic ascendency. The founder of Trinity, Sir Thom- 
as Pope, was an ardent partisan of the Eeaction, and has 
earnestly enjoined his Fellows to avoid the contamination 
of the Protestant heresy. He lived to see them make 
way for Protestants. Sir Thomas White, the founder 
of St. John's, was a great merchant, and one of a group 
whose princely munificence in the endowment of literary 
or charitable institutions ennobled English commerce in 
those days. In England, at the present day, a man who 
has grown rich by commerce generally aspires to found 
a family. In America, it seems, he still aspires to found 
an institution. 

The Elizabethan era was glorious at Oxford as well as 
elsewhere, though the literary spirit of the University 
was classical, not national, like that which culminated in 
Shakspeare. The learned queen paid us a visit, was en- 
tertained with classical dramas and flattered in classical 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFOED. 257 

harangues, and, at jDarting, expressed her warm affection 
for the University. On Shotover Hill, over which the 
old London Koad passed, is a monument marking the 
spot to which the heads of colleges toiled up to meet her, 
and where, no doubt, there was abundance of ceremony 
and genuflection. It need scarcely be said that her still 
more learned successor made the light of his countenance 
shine upon us. In the great Quadrangle of the Schools, 
a very noble monument of the late Tudor architecture, 
upon a fagade pedantically adorned with all the Greek 
orders, sits the effigy of the royal Solomon, majestic as 
when he drank the rich incense of Bacon's adulation. 
And be it said that James was, at all events, none the 
worse for his learning. It inspired him with sone benef- 
icent ideas, and redeemed his weakness from utter degra- 
dation. 

James bestowed on the University the right of send- 
ing representatives to Parliament. A questionable boon. 
For, though universities, if they are worth any thing, will 
make their influence felt in politics, it is not desirable 
that they should be directly involved in the struggles of 
political parties. Theirs should be a neutral territory 
and a serener air. 

Exeter College, founded by a prelate of Edward II., 
was refounded and raised to its present magnificence by 
Sir William Petre, a statesman of the Elizabethan age, 
and an upholder of the Spartan theory of education 
against Ascham, who took the more liberal view. These 
famous Elizabethan statesmen were all highly-cultivated 
men. Cultivation without force may be impotent, but 
force without cultivation is blind. Force without culti- 



258 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

vation has produced great effects for tlie time, but only 
cultivated men have left their mark upon the world. 

Another knight of the Elizabethan age, Sir Thomas 
Bodley, founded the Bodleian Library, now one of the 
famous libraries of the world. The book -worm will 
scarcely find a greater paradise than the good knight's 
antique reading-room, especially in the quiet months of 
the summer vacation. If the spirit of learned leisure 
and repose breathes any where, it is there. 

Jesus College was founded in the reign of Elizabeth, 
for Welshmen, the remnant of the old Celtic inhabitants 
of Britain, who, saved from the Saxon sword by the ram- 
part of the Welsh hills, had in that fastness preserved 
their national language and character, and do still to 
some extent preserve them, though railroads and other 
centralizing and civilizing influences are now fast com- 
pleting the inevitable work of amalgamation. To draw 
Welsh students to English Universities would of course 
be an object with all who desired the consolidation of 
the United Kingdom. This was a Protestant college, 
founded to uphold and disseminate the faith which Lin- 
coln College, its neighbor over the way, had been found- 
ed to combat and put down. The Fellows are adjured to 
prefer Scripture to that which is not Scripture, truth to 
tradition. They are also directed specially to cultivate, 
and even to speak, Hebrew — a language which Protest- 
ants loved as the key to the Old Testament, and Catho- 
lics dreaded as the sure source of misbeliefs. According 
to the strong partisans of Catholicism, to learn Greek was 
heretical, to learn Hebrew was diabolical. The lingering 
love of clerical celibacy, however, betrays itself in a stat- 



THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 259 

lite forbidding the principal to marry. It is well known 
how strong this feeling was in the half-Catholic heart of 
the Virgin Queen. 

Wadham College was founded in the reign of James I., 
on a site occupied by a monastery of Austin friars. In 
style it is a mixture of the Gothic college with the Tudor 
manor-house. In beauty and attractiveness as a home of 
learning it is second, perhaps, only to Magdalen. It is, 
moreover, interesting as the last great collegiate founda- 
tion of the mediaeval type, the last creation of that medi- 
a3val spirit, which, like Gothic architecture, lingered at 
Oxford longer than in any other place in Protestant Brit- 
ain. Sir Nicholas Wadham, whose name it bears, seems 
to have been, like a large portion of the wealthier classes 
at that time, a waverer in religion. It is said that he 
first intended to found a monastery abroad, but afterward 
made up his mind to found a college at home. Upon his 
death his widow, Dame Dorothy Wadham, fulfilled his 
design by building and endowing this noble house. The 
hand of time has touched it with a far higher beauty, 
especially on its garden side, since its foundress looked 
upon her work. 

Two colleges, Pembroke and Worcester (the latter 
known to our summer visitors by the beauty of its gar- 
dens), are of later date than Wadham ; but these grew 
up to their present goodly proportions out of foundations 
which, in their origin, were comparatively poor and in- 
significant. 

Meantime a great change has been passing over the 
character of the University. In the thirteenth century 
we had been liberal and even somewhat revolutionary. 



260 THE UNIVERSITY OE OXFORD. 

both in religion and politics; we now became at once 
Tory and High-Church. We had been the school of lib- 
erty, progress, hope ; we now became the school of doc- 
trines most adverse to them all. This was due mainly to 
the clerical character of the Fellowship, which, the Uni- 
versity having been completely absorbed in the colleges, 
bound her destinies to those of the Established Church 
and its protector and ally, the Crown. The rule of cel- 
ibacy, and the somewhat monkish tendencies of college 
life, also contributed to make Oxford, as she has twice 
been, the scene of a great Eomanizing reaction. 

In restoring the beautiful Gothic Church of St. Mary, 
where the University sermons are preached, we have 
spared, on historical grounds, an incongruous portico, in 
the Italian style, which, though built nearly a century 
after the Eeformation, bears an image of the Virgin and 
Child. This is a monument of Laud, and helped to send 
him to the scaffold. In the interior quadrangle of St. 
John's College stand the statues of Charles and Henrietta, 
placed there by the same hand. Laud was the President 
of this college. Here he learned the narrow, arbitrary 
notions of government which he afterward put in practice 
with such fatal effect upon a more important scene ; and 
here, in angry college controversies with the Puritans, he 
imbibed the malignant hatred of that sect which, when 
he had mounted to power, broke out in persecution. 

Laud was a University reformer, though in a despotic 
way. He gave us a new Code of University Statutes, 
containing, no doubt, some enactments which were useful 
in their way. But here, too, he was Laud. He complete- 
ly sacrificed liberty to order. He gave us no power of 



THE UNIVEKSITY OF OXFORD. 261 

amendment ; and lie legally bound upon our necks the 
oligarchy toward which our once free Constitution had 
for some time been practically tending. We burst his 
fetters only a few years ago. 

During the great civil war, Oxford, once almost the 
head-quarters of Simon de Montfort, was the head-quar- 
ters of Charles. The city was in a state of siege. Study 
ceased. The students were in arms. The Eoyalist Par- 
liaments sat in our college halls and our Convocation. 
One seat of learning became the Mint. Soldiers trooped 
in the streets. The college plate was melted down into 
money ; and thus perished, probably, a rare collection of 
medieval works of art. The monuments of that period 
are not houses of learning, but the traces of earth-works 
which united the Eiver Cherwell with the Isis, and pro- 
tected the beleaguered city. 

The victorious Puritans have left their mark on some 
painted windows and Eomish images. The extreme fa- 
natics of the party would have done away with Universi- 
ties and learning altogether, and left nothing but the Bible 
and the pulpit. But Cromwell was of a different mind. 
He was no incarnation either of mere fanaticism or of 
brute force. He had been bred at a grammar-school and 
at Cambridge. What was more, he had conversed on the 
highest themes with the choicest spirits of his time. He 
protected and fostered both Universities, and did his best 
to draw highly-cultivated men from them into the public 
service. Of course he put Puritans in our high places. 
But these men promoted learning as well as Puritanism, 
restored discipline, revived education, and upheld the 
honor of the University in their day. 



262 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. ^. 

Of course Oxford hailed the Eestoration. Alas for the 
depths of servility into which, in that her evil hour, she 
fell ! Archbishop Sheldon then reigned over its in the 
spirit of the most violent Eoyalism and the narrowest in- 
tolerance. The Sheldonian Theatre, in which our Com- 
memorations are held, is his work. Let it do what it 
may to redeem an unloved and unhonored name. 

The Eadclyffe Library, rising with its Palladian dome 
in not unpleasing contrast to the Gothic buildings which 
surround it, and upon the whole galaxy of which it looks 
down, is a memorial of the Augustan glories of the reign 
of Anne, of which even Tory Oxford did not fail to catch 
the beams. Its founder. Dr. Eadclyffe, was the court phy- 
sician of the time. Less pleasing memorials of the same 
age are the Chapel of Trinity College, and other build- 
ings, designed by Aldrich, the Dean of Christchurch in 
that day, a tasteless architect, but a man of liberal culture, 
and the centre of a group of scholars who made Christ- 
church illustrious in his time. 

And now we come to a period over which every loyal 
son of Oxford will gladly pass as quickly as he may. 
The State Church of England during the greater half of 
the last century was torpid and corrupt, and Oxford 
shared its torpor and corruption. The only spirit active 
in the University was that of Jacobitism — a political con- 
spiracy in favor of the heir of James II., and against the 
constitutional liberties of the nation — destitute, in the 
case of the Oxford Fellows, even of the redeeming lustre 
which valor sheds over the self-devoted adherents of a 
bad cause. Instead of bleeding at Preston and Culloden, 
these men merely indulged their factious feeling by 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 263 

" drinking the king over the water" in what Gibbon calls 
the " deep but dull potations which excused the brisk in- 
temperance of youth," In truth the University, in the 
proper sense of the word, could scarcely be said to live 
in those days. Her corpse was possessed by an alien 
spirit of clerical depravity and political intrigue. Learn- 
ing slept, education languished, university and college 
examinations became a farce. Life in most of the col- 
leges was indolent, sensual, and coarse. A few names, 
such as those of Lowth and Wharton, redeemed our dis- 
honor. Christchurch — thanks, chiefly, to the good schol- 
ars it received from Westminster school — maintained a 
position higher than that of the other colleges. But our 
general history for seventy or eighty years was such that 
we would gladly bury it in oblivion. It is not surprising 
that a University where duty was dead, where religious 
faith was a mere prejudice deeply tainted with political 
bigotry, should have become the mother of skepticism 
and irreligion, or that the most conspicuous name among 
the Oxford men of the last century should be that of 
Gibbon. If we seek architectural memorials of this evil 
age, they will be found in tasteless masses of modern 
building, such as the "new buildings" at Magdalen, de- 
signed merely as luxurious residences, without any 
thought of the higher aims of architectural art. 

The commencement of the present century, when the 
mind of Europe had been stirred by the French Eevolu- 
tion, and the great struggles, political and intellectual as 
well as military, to which it gave birth, witnessed a re- 
vival of learning and education at Oxford. Then it was 
that our examinations were again made effective, that our 



264 THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD. 

class-list was instituted, and that Oxford once more be- 
came, wliat slie had so long ceased to be, a power in the 
intellectual world. Then it was that our Cannings and 
Peels began to arise, and that we began again to send 
men of worth and high aspirations into the service of the 
state. Still we were High Tories. At Oxford, in 1814, 
the Allied Sovereigns celebrated their victory, and a me- 
morial of their visit is seen in the portraits of the Emperor 
of Kussia and the King of Prussia, which hang, with that 
of Greorge IV. between them, in the Sheldonian Theatre. 
Among the honors and rewards heaped on the Duke of 
Wellington, the great chief of the Tory party. Was the 
Chancellorship of the University, and at his installation 
Oxford was the scene of a memorable gathering of his 
political adherents. It was, in fact, their first rally after 
their great overthrow. 

Scarcely, however, had the intellectual revival of the 
University commenced, when, owing to the clerical and 
half- monastic character of the colleges, Oxford became 
the centre of the great priestly and Eomanizing reaction 
in the Anglican Church, of which Dr. Newman was the 
illustrious leader, and which was provoked by the gen- 
eral progress of liberal opinions in the nation and the 
victory of Parliamentary Eeform. The annals of that 
reaction belong rather to the history of the Anglican 
Church than to that of the University of Oxford. But 
when it was at its height it completely absorbed the in- 
tellectual activity of the University, and fatally shattered 
many a fine mind destined by nature to render high 
service to Oxford and to the nation, but now rendered 
useless, except as the wrecked vessel which marks the 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 265 

sunken reef. Of this attempt to revive the faith and the 
ecclesiastical institutions of the Middle Ages, the archi- 
tectural additions and restorations in the Gothic style 
with which Oxford abounds, and which have been made 
within the last thirty years, are in part the monuments, 
though they are mainly the fruits of an improved taste in 
architecture, and a returning preference for the Eomantic 
over the Classical in poetry and art. The Martyrs' Me- 
morial also — erected near the spot where Cranmer, Lati- 
mer, and Eidley suffered — may be regarded as, in another 
sense, a monument of the same epoch. It is the archi- 
tectural manifesto of the Protestant party against the 
Eomanizing doctrines of Dr. Newman and his disciples. 

The secession of Dr. Newman to the Church of Eome 
closed, in truth, the history of the religious movement of 
which he was the leader. With him, its genius, its po- 
etry, its chivalry, its fascinations for high intellects and 
spiritual natures passed away. Since that time it has al- 
most lost its spiritual character, and degenerated into a 
mere State Church combination, the subservient ally of 
political Toryism, and the tool of the Tory chiefs. Twen- 
ty years ago it carried with it almost all the powerful in- 
tellects of the University ; now it has decisively lost them 
all. Eomanizing extravagances in ceremonial, language, 
dress, and all that Carlyle calls the '^ millinery and up- 
holstery" part of the movement, still go on ; but these 
are the freaks and toys of children, not the deliberate ef- 
forts of men to master the intellect of the world. 

Since the catastrophe of Tractarianism the proper in- 
terests of the University have revived, and a more liberal 
spirit has begun to pervade our society and administra- 

M 



266 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

tion. The Tractarian movementj thougli itself reaction- 
ary, broke up old Anglican and Tory prejudices, weaned 
active minds from subservience to custom and tradition, 
loosened the soil in all directions, and prepared the ground 
for healthier plants to grow. Having trained those who 
were influenced by it to rest on authority instead of rest- 
ing on truth, it, of course, at its downfall, left behind it a 
certain amount of religious perplexity and distress pecul- 
iar to Oxford, besides what is generally prevalent in an 
age of final transition from false authority to rational re- 
ligion. But this is accidental, and, as Oxford teachers 
and students brace themselves to their proper duties, it 
will pass away. 

Meantime our course of education, till lately confined 
to classics and mathematics, is being rendered more lib- 
eral and more adequate to the needs of our age by the 
admission of Science, History, Jurisprudence, and Politic- 
al Economy. The Museum, newly built on the north of 
the city, and the Taylor Institution for the stud}^ of mod- 
ern languages, are the architectural expressions of an on- 
ward movement in education almost as important as that 
which substituted classical literature for the scholastic 
philosophy in the sixteenth centurj^. 

We have also got rid, by the help of Parliament, of the 
antiquated codes of statutes with which each founder, anx- 
ious to perpetuate his own will to the end of time, had 
prevented the free development and frozen the life-blood 
of his college. Our case is a warning to others, especial- 
ly to the citizens of the United States, where private mu- 
nificence displays itself to so large an extent in the en- 
dowment of institutions, against the danger, incident to 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 267 

perpetual endowments, of allowing the gifts of one gen- 
eration to become the fetters of those which follow. No 
perpetual foundation should be permitted without a pow- 
er vested in proper authorities of amending, from time to 
time, the regulations of the founder, so far as is consistent 
with his main object, which should always be distinctly 
stated at the commencement of the instrument of found- 
ation. 

At the same time and by the same assistance we shook 
ofP, in part at least, the oligarchical government imposed 
on us by Laud, and recovered in some measure the free- 
dom of action and the power of self-adaptation and de- 
velopment without which no institution can long sustain 
its greatness. 

The friends of Reform and Progress within the Uni- 
versity did not call on the central government for aid 
without hesitation. All Englishmen are attached to lo- 
cal liberties and jealous of the interference of the central 
power. We are, moreover, convinced that the great places 
of national education and learning, as the guardians of 
interests and principles which are the common heritage 
of al], should be as free as possible from the influence and 
vicissitudes of political parties. But it was for emanci- 
pation, not for interference, that Oxford reformers appeal- 
ed to Parliament; and it was in a case where, from the 
absence of any legal power of amending our statutes, we 
were unable to emancipate ourselves. 

Moreover, from the predominance of the clerical ele- 
ment (the immemorial bane of our greatness), we are sub- 
jected, in academical legislation, to an inflaence more sec- 
tional and more injurious than that of any political party 



268 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 

not wholly regardless of the general interests of the na- 
tion. It is on this account that the friends of liberty at 
Oxford are obliged again to appeal to Parliament to re- 
lieve US from the religious tests, and enable us once more 
to become the University of the whole nation. Your Ox- 
ford guest will not exert himself with the less energy or 
the less confidence in this cause after having, once in his 
life, breathed the air, to him so strange, to you so happi- 
ly familiar, of perfect religious liberty, and learned, from 
the evidence of his own senses, how false, how blasphe- 
mous is the belief that rational religion is opposed to free- 
dom, or that freedom is injurious to rational religion. 

Thus we have traced, though necessarily in a brief and 
summary way, the history of this group of corporations, 
and seen the united threads of their existence pass through 
many successive phases of the national history, and re- 
flect the varying hues, the happy lights, and the melan- 
choly shadows of each phase in turn. We have seen pass 
before us the long train of Founders, in the characters 
and costumes of many successive ages : the sceptred Plan- 
tagenets ; the warrior prelates ; the ecclesiastical states- 
men of the Middle Ages ; the grave knights, bountiful 
ladies, and wealthy merchants of the Tudor age; the 
more familiar forms of modern intellect and science. A 
common purpose runs through and unites the whole, 
binding the present to all the generations of the past. In 
the latest buildings we see modern science installed in a 
home prepared for it by the Gothic architecture of the 
Middle Ages. 

It only remains to be said that Oxford, like all the an- 
tiquities and glories of England, is yours as well as ours. 



THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 269 

It is a part of the common heritage of the Anglo-Saxon 
race. I trust that any American who may come to it, ei- 
ther as a visitor or a student, will not fail to be welcomed, 
as I know by happy experience that Englishmen are wel- 
comed here. 



f 



THE END, 



Carlyle^s Frederick. 



HISTORY OF FRIED RICH II., called 

Frederick the Great By Thomas Carlvle, Author 
of a ^^ Hi/lory of the French Revolution^'' ''Oliver Crom- 
well^'' ^'c. With Portraits and Maps. Complete in Six 
Volumes. 12 ;;/<?, Cloth^ $2 00 per Volume. 



Mr. Carlyle is about the only living writer wliose opinions are of value even when 
it is impossible to agree with them. No one is more fond than he of paradox, but few 
men's paradoxes hint at so important truths. No one with a more autocratic dogma- 
tism sets up strong men as heroes, or condemns the hapless possessors of pot-bellies to 
infamy; but then his judgments, even when they can not be confirmed, always en- 
force some weighty principle which we were in danger of forgetting. And if it some- 
times happens that neither the hero nor the priuciples commend themselves, still the 
thoroughness of the execution, and the fire with which all his writings are instinct, 
never fail to make a great work — London Review. 

He writes history just as no man but Carlyle can write it, and for this reason his 
history will be widely held in great admiration. We should never turn to this so 
much for a history of Frederick as for Carlyle: he gives us himself emphatically, 
amusingly, unquestionably, in these pages; yet he picks up facts to illustrate the life 
of his hero and his times that no other man would have thought of touching, and to 
the thinking mind those facts are ful of the bone and sinew of h.\9,tovY.— Evening 
Pvst. 

History, in the true sense, he does not and can not write, for he looks on mankind 
as a herd without volition and without moral force; but such vivid pictures of events, 
such living conceptions of character, we find nowhere else in prose. The figures of 
most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out 
through any hole that criticism may tear in them ; but Carlyle's are so real that, if 
you prick them, they bleed. — North Ainerican Review. 

Wlien Carlyle writes a book we only look into it to see Carlyle, not the subject of 
which he writes. He stands up among authors like a knarled and sturdy oak, full 
of all sorts of fantastic phfipe?, ri'liculous oddities that denote a superabundance of 
vigor in his growth — a vigor that will not be confined by the laws of ordinar}' life. 
Frederick, as seen through the eyes of Carl5ie, will and does possess the attributes 
/)f a god that never existed among men. This book Avill seize the big-eared world, 
and compel it to listen — Boston Poat. 



Carlyle's Frederick the Great. 



Probably the History of Frederick will forever remain one of the finest pieces of lit- 
erary painting, as well as one of the most marvelous attempts at special pleading, 
extant in our own or any language.— IyO?i(?o?i Spectator. 

The rcdactcur can not adequately convey, in the short space allotted him, a con- 
ception of the masterly thought, the comely diction, the astute philosophy, which 
manifest themselves on every page of this last product of Carlyle's scholarly re- 
searches and gifted intellect. There are some publications submitted to his examina- 
tion which, because of their incorporate, inherent power, can not receive from his pen 
a satisfactory mentioning of. " Frederick the Great" is one of them. Let the re- 
viewer be never so succinct and comprehensive in the expression of his critical 
opinions, he can simply marvel in silence at the graphic details (as in the book 
now under our thumbing) of plots and campaigns, in cabinet council or on field of 
battle, which captivate his attention, and then do what we most sincerely desire in 
this respect — enjoin upon every reader an earnest perusal of the same. And this ia 
the best, nay, all, that he can do — Home Journal. 

Carlyle is, indeed, quaint and odd; but he is no less earnest, and true, and noble, 
and grand. lie is the one specimen of his kind, we really believe, of philosophers, 
historians, and poets. Of course we find his peculiarities all through the great work, 
and equally of course we find it profoundly interesting in matter and piquant in 
style. — Ex>iscox>al Recorder. 

Mr. Carlyle has at last completed his graven image, and sets it up for the admira- 
tion of the world. The Smelfunguses and Di-yasdusts, whom Carlyle deliglits to rid- 
icule, have been great helps to him in gathering up the details of a life which at best 
was unamiable, if not brutal; stem and unlovely, if not repulsive— the life of a man 
whose love for war in the field was carried into the closet, and penetrated the gentler 
seclusion of the family circle. Mr. Carlyle, with that amazing fancy for hero-wor- 
ship in which he excels, would force us to believe his paragon all that he paints 
him ; and there is certainly power in the picture. The old records have been most 
thoroughly sifted by Carlyle, viho seems to have eliminated every grain of wheat from 
bushels of chaflf. — Examiner and Chronicle. 

The reader is out of patience with him in almost every page, yet reads him through 
to the end, and closes the book still wishing for more. He is a man of tremendous 
prejudices and partialities. Frederick is one of his heroes. Carlyle, however, has 
reasons always to give for his likes and dislikes, and one is sure to be interested in 
the argument, whether he accepts the conclusion or not— Christian Times and 
Witness. 



Published by HARPER cS^ BROTHERS, New York. 



Harper & Brothers will send the above work by mail, postage prepaid, to any 
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